AMD's Radeon HD 4550 reviewed
The main component of the latest Radeon is a GPU with the codename RV710. Like its bigger siblings RV770 and RV730 it also tries to deliver as much performance with a chip size as small as possible. The price sector is the area at and below 50 Euros.
The specifications of selected low-cost graphics cards:
| | AMD Radeon | | | | Nvidia Geforce | | |
|---|
| | HD 4670 | HD 4550 | HD 3650 | HD 3450 | 9500 GT | 9400 GT | 8500 GT |
|---|
| Chip | RV730 | RV710 | RV635 | RV615 | G96(b) | G96(b) | G86 |
|---|
| Process (Nanometer) | 55 | 55 | 55 | 55 | 65 (b: 55) | 65 (b: 55) | 80 |
|---|
| Transistors (Mio.) | 514 | 242 | 378 | 181 | 314 | ? | 210 |
|---|
| Core frequency (MHz) | 750 | 600 | 725 | 600 | 550 | 550 | 450 |
|---|
| Shader-ALU frequency (MHz) | 750 | 600 | 725 | 600 | 1.375 | 1.350 | 900 |
|---|
| VRAM frequency (MHz) | 1.000 | 800 | 800 | 500 | 800 | 400 | 400 |
|---|
| Shader version | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 |
|---|
| Shader ALUs (VS/PS) | 320 | 80 | 120 | 40 | 32 | 16 | 16 |
|---|
| Texture units | 32 | 8 | 8 | 4 | 16 | 8 | 8 |
|---|
| VRAM (MiByte) | 512 | 256/512 | 512 | 256 | 512 | 512 | 512 |
|---|
| RAM type | GDDR3 | DDR3 | GDDR3 | DDR2 | GDDR3 | DDR2 | DDR2 |
|---|
| GFLOP/s | 480 | 96 | 174 | 48 | 88 | 43,2 | 28,8 |
|---|
| Texturefill (MTex/s) | 24.000 | 4.800 | 5.800 | 2.400 | 8.800 | 4.400 | 3.600 |
|---|
| Bandwidth (GiByte/s) | 32 | 12,8 | 25,6 | 8 | 25,6 | 12,8 | 12,8 |
|---|
As you can see the HD 4670 (RV730) has the better ratio between calculating units and Die size than the HD 4550. But the latter one does better than its predecessor HD 3450: The number of Shader ALUs increased from 40 to 80 and the texture units were doubled from 4 to 8 units. The memory interface is still 64 Bit only but now accesses faster DDR3 memory (no "G” there though). This results in a bandwidth of 12.8 GByte per second.
In terms of figures the Radeon HD 4550 should be twice as fast as the HD 3450, but noticeably slower than the HD 3650. But what does it look like in reality? We will check that now.
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