Advanced Micro Devices announced today the introduction of the ATI Radeon HD 4550 and ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics cards, the latest ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics line up additions. The new cards are meant for the mainstream market level, and they are able to provide considerable gaming and HD multimedia performance at low prices. The new cards feature the same technology as the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series, including DirectX10.1 support.

“The ATI Radeon HD 4550 and ATI Radeon 4350 graphics cards are the final pieces of the puzzle in rounding out the highly successful ATI Radeon HD 4000 series family,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “AMD set out to lead performance at every price point and today we offer a complete family of graphics cards that delivers on our commitment of winning performance in each market segment.”

The ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card is a passive cooled solution able to provide mainstream-class performance for only $55 for a 512MB memory configuration. The ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics board is priced starting at $39 for a 256 MB memory configuration and offers more features than similar competitive cards do.

The HD 4550 solution comes with 80 stream processing cores, is based on the AMD 55nm process and includes the cutting edge technology featured by the Radeon HD 4800 series. According to the company, the new card is able to leverage the gaming experience of any user through the 96 GFLOPS of compute power it delivers. HD 4550 opens the gates for DirectX10.1 games that couldn't have been played before by any product in its segment.

This passive cooled graphics solution operates at less than 20 watts of power when fully loaded. It delivers new gaming capabilities while featuring the minimum of noise, heat emanation and power consumption. The new ATI Radeon HD 4550 configured with 512MB of DDR3 memory should become available in October.

“It’s great to see AMD deliver gaming performance for the mainstream segment,” said Alexander Muller, CEO, SK Gaming International. “People will be excited to know they can get their hands on leading graphics performance at an incredible value price.”

The low-cost ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics card is able to raise the performance bar more than seven times higher above any mainstream integrated solution. The board comes with 256MB of memory and 7.1 channel audio via HDMI, features unseen until now on any card in this segment. HD 4350 should be available in October as well.

The HD 4550 and 4350 are great solutions for home theater enthusiasts as well. When coupled with HD displays, they are able to offer a feature-rich, high definition and high quality home theatre experience. In addition, AMD’s second generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2.0) ensures smooth HD media playback, while ATI Avivo HD technology is able to deliver sharp, crisp images and vibrant colors. This way, the user experience is enhanced even more by these ultra-quiet graphics solutions.

According to the company, a dozen add-in-board partners support the ATI Radeon HD 4550 and ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics cards and are offering custom designs of the products. ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, GIGABYTE, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology and VisionTek are included in ATI's partners list.

Tests show enhanced multimedia capabilities for the new ATI Radeon cards

As the cards were spotted and expected to be unveiled for quite a while now, test reports and reviews popped-up as soon as the Sunnyvale-based company announced them. According to the guys from AnandTech, both ATI Radeon HD 4550 and ATI Radeon HD 4350 can be considered perfect HTPC cards. Not only are these cards cheaper than any similar solution, but they also offer 8-channel LPCM over HDMI, making them perfectly fit for any home theater setup. “Both GPUs should decode a single stream 1080p Blu-ray movie without any issues, offloading 100% of the decode pipeline to the GPU; we confirmed that the 4550 works as expected and we're assuming the 4350 is the same given that the hardware is identical,” says the review.

The tests performed by AnandTech were mainly directed to unveil the capabilities of the new cards over integrated solutions. The results fully showed that the performance level is raised high above and, although they are not impressive when it comes to gaming, there is no doubt that the cards are a much better option. This only applies when all the settings are set to minimum. At a medium quality, the cards are way behind compared to an Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT card or a Radeon HD 4670. At high level settings, even the 9500 GT solution falls far behind HD 4670.

When it comes to power consumption, tests unveiled that the system configured with one of these cards needs less power than with a 9500 GT or a HD 4670 even when under load. The games used for tests were Crysis, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Oblivion. The cards were not able to perform very well when running the games, yet they did an acceptable job. After all, they are low-end cards and the company unveiled them as a better solution over integrated graphics.

Given their low prices and performance capabilities, the ATI Radeon HD 4550 and ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics cards can be considered better options compared to integrated solutions, especially when it comes to HD playback. They are indeed able to provide new levels of performance for the segment and open the road to enhanced user experience.