AMD Radeon HD 4770 Close to Official Debut

According to previous rumors, Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices is expected to announce a new Radeon graphics card that will become the world's first card to take advantage of the company's next-generation 40nm graphics processing unit. Codenamed RV740, the company's upcoming graphics processing unit is slated to debut tomorrow, while we are already seeing a number of these cards surfacing on the Internet, prior to their official release. Such is the case with an upcoming Radeon HD 4770, the commercial name of AMD's first 40nm card.

The technical sheet of the card would indicate that users will be faced with a low-performance graphics accelerator that will become available with a price tag of under $100. Featured with no less than 640 Stream processors and the highly anticipated 40nm RV740 GPU, the card also provides the end-user with a 128-bit memory interface, 512MB of GDDR5 memory, support for DirectX 10.1 and two DVI connectors. With a performance level that is said to come close to that of AMD's Radeon HD 4850, the upcoming HD 4770 will pack a graphics core speed of 750MHz, according to currently available details.

Despite a few hours until the alleged official release of the card, Gigabyte's version of the HD 4770 has already made its way on the Internet, being put through a series of preliminary benchmarks and giving us a first look at what it has to offer. According to the results, users should expect a score of about P7408 in 3DMakr Vantage, when it is coupled with a high-speed processor, such as the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, and 4GB of DDR2-800 memory.

What's impressive about the HD 4770, aside from its next-generation GPU, is the fact that AMD plans to sell this card as a direct competitor for NVIDIA's GeForce 9800GT. Consequently, users will be able to take advantage of an increased performance in a more affordable package.