Date:
Tuesday , April 28, 2009
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Mark Warner
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AMD Radeon HD 4770

Cheap price, low power, and an enjoyable gameplay experience, all of this is possible in AMD’s new Radeon HD 4770 launching today. We will take the HD 4770 for a spin in six games and compare it to a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250. You’ll be surprised at the level of gameplay possible for around $100 these days.

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System Test Setup

We will be using a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard, an Intel Core i7 920 Overclocked at 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Dominator DDR3.

While it might be a bit “overkill,” we use the i7 920 at 3.6GHz processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the i7 920 at 3.6GHz seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

Article Image

GPUz hasn’t been updated for the HD 4770 yet; it shows some incorrect information so we will forgo that screenshot for now. For our drivers we are using the absolute latest from both camps. The AMD driver provided was supplied directly from AMD to use for the HD 4770.

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home.

We will follow with apples-to-apples testing with minimum, maximum, and average framerates on each game page.