ATI Radeon 4550 Performance Preview

It’s been an extraordinary summer for ATI graphics. Without a doubt, their revolutionary RV7xx graphics architecture delivers an unprecedented level of performance per square millimeter. This allows cards like the Radeon 4850 and 4870 to compete very favorably with NVIDIA’s GeForce 9800 GTX+ and GTX 260 GPUs despite their smaller die size: RV770 measures just 260 square millimeters versus GT200’s 412 square millimeters.

With these cards competing favorably against NVIDIA in the mainstream graphics segment, and the Radeon HD 4870 X2 sitting as the king of the hill in the high-end graphics market as the world’s fastest graphics card, tactically ATI’s strategy now shifts to the budget segment of the graphics market. It’s been said that ATI is aiming for 50% share of the discrete graphics market by the end of this year; in order to get there ATI has to win this crucial segment, as budget cards ship in far larger volumes than mainstream and high-end cards


To capture this segment ATI has developed two new GPUs, RV710 and RV730. We showed you RV730 earlier this month in our Radeon 4670 Performance Preview. In the article we found that the $79 4670 512MB was an impressive performer, at times the card actually outran ATI’s Radeon 3850 despite its memory bandwidth disadvantage (the 4670 sports a 128-bit memory interface with peak bandwidth of 32GB/sec versus the 3850’s 256-bit interface providing up to 57.6GB/sec of bandwidth to the GPU).

Today ATI is unleashing the second piece of the puzzle, RV710.

A quick primer on RV710

Just as RV730 is a cost-reduced variant of ATI’s RV770 GPU used in the Radeon 4850/4870, RV710 is a cost-reduced version of RV730. RV710 has the same SIMD core arrangement as RV730, with 40 stream processors per SIMD core, only in the case of RV710 ATI only equips the GPU with two SIMD cores (80 stream processors total). With fewer SIMD cores, the number of texture units and ROPs are also reduced – the chip boasts 8 texture units and 4 ROPs.

ATI further pares costs by using a narrower 64-bit memory interface in RV710 versus the 128-bit interface found in RV730.

ATI is launching two cards based on RV730, the Radeon 4550, which should be hitting shelves today, and the Radeon 4350, which should hit retail in the next few weeks. Here are the complete specs on the cards:

ATI RV710 Feature Set
	Radeon 4550 512MB DDR3	Radeon 4350 256MB DDR2
# of Stream Processors	80	80
Core Clock	600MHz	600MHz
Memory Interface	64-bit	64-bit
Memory Clock	800MHz	500MHz
Memory Type	DDR3	DDR2
Memory Bandwidth	12.8GB/sec	8.0GB/sec
Texture fill-rate	4.8 Gigatexels/sec	4.8 Gigatexels/sec
MSRP	$45-$55	$39
Max Board Power	20W	20W