14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices released its new Radeon HD 4600 series (HD 4670 and HD 4650) a few days ago, but not before ATI users and enthusiasts were forced to wait for quite some time from the moment the series was initially announced. Now that the cards aiming at the mainstream market segment have been unleashed, the Sunnyvale company seems to be preparing the introduction of an entry level (or budget) GPU later this month.
ATI's RV710 graphics processor was announced a few weeks ago as well, and recent reports come to confirm, and bring more details about its September launch. The RV710 GPU will come with the new Radeon 4500 and 4300 series featuring DDR3 and DDR2 respectively. The new mainstream generation will sport 80 shader processors, double the number featured on ATI's RV620 lineup. A second increase can be spotted in the Texture units, which went up from 4 to 8. Interestingly enough, the chip manufacturer has managed to operate these changes with a quite small increase in die size.
The new series should strike many OEMs’ fancy thanks to its incredibly low price, especially if they’re also planning to order thousands of units at a time. Other attractive features of the product include a very low power consumption paired with a good heat dissipation, 1080p HD decode and, above all, three to four times more performance delivered over integrated graphics.
At 1280×1024 resolution, RV710 managed to score 10xx and 40xx performance figures in Vantage and 3DMark06 respectively. These figures alone manage to put ATI's GPU in front of rival NVIDIA 128-bit 9400GT. The Radeon 4550 will feature either 256 or 512MB of DDR3, while the 4350 card should come with 256MB of DDR2. The Radeon 4300/4500 series should hit the market on September 25 at a $39-$59 retail price. The Radeon HD 4650, which comes with 512MB of GDDR2, is expected to become available on the 25th as well, and will have the price set at $69.