ATI Radeon HD 4670 Hands-On

Now that the big Radeon HD 4800 series card launches are out of the way, AMD is ready to fill out the rest of its product line-up with more affordable card options including several sub-$100 cards in the new Radeon HD 4600 family. We got our hands on an early evaluation ATI Radeon HD 4670 sample and made it do all sorts of naughty things with 3DMark Vantage, Call of Duty 4, and Crysis.

Let's go over what the Radeon HD 4670 is and what it isn't before we get to the benchmark performance graphs. The Radeon HD 4670 only has a $79 MSRP, so don't expect it to hang in there with the more expensive Radeon HD 4800 and GeForce GTX 200 cards. That's not saying that the card is a total gimp--the 4670 still has 320 stream processors clocked at 750MHz. The Radeon HD 4870 and 4850 cards in comparison have 800 stream processors each, but they cost two or three times as much as the 4670.

In terms of cost per stream processor, the 4670 is similar to the 4850 in value. We can't really extend that comparison out to the Radeon HD 4870 because the high-end card uses faster GDDR5 memory while the 4670 only has GDDR3 or DDR3 memory depending on the configuration. The card will be available with 512MB of 1GHz GDDR3 or 1GB of 900MHz DDR3. (The slower 1 GB DDR3 version is for people who don't know any better, or spent all of their money on a 30-inch LCD and had nothing left over for the video card.)

The Radeon HD 4670 can still handle multimedia playback just fine even with a reduced stream processor count. The card has the same HD video decode acceleration and HDMI output capabilities as the bigger Radeons, but the smaller GPU means that the board only needs a single slot, consumes less power, and can work with a quieter fan.

The 4670's primary competition will be other sub-$100 cards. Unfortunately, we only had a GeForce 9600 GT card in our stable of mid-range GeForce 9 cards, so keep in mind that the GT runs about $25 to $40 more than the 4670. We also included a Radeon HD 3870 to show you how the 4670 compares against over-the-hill enthusiast cards from the past.

Intel Core2 Duo X6800 2.93GHz, eVGA 680i, 2GB Corsair XMS Memory (1GBx2), 750GB Seagate 7200.11 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows Vista 32-bit SP1. Graphics Card: GeForce 9600 GT, GeForce 8600 GTS, Radeon HD 4670, Radeon HD 3870, Nvidia ForceWare 175.19, Catalyst 8.8, beta Catalyst 8.53 RC1 .

The Radeon HD 3870 and GeForce 9600 GT come out ahead, but the cards also cost significantly more than the 4670. The Radeon HD 4870 put up very respectable numbers in our benchmarks. Call of Duty 4 in 1680x1050 is playable at 53 fps, and the card also survives Crysis with 23 fps at 1280x1024. Not bad at all.