AMD has announced the introduction of the ATI Radeon HD 4550 and 4350. Both based on a new RV710 GPU with a core clock of 600 MHz, they come equipped with DDR3 at 800 MHz and DDR2 at 500 MHz respectively; the clear differentiation in naming, when only the memory is in fact different, is much appreciated.
The RV710 is an economy GPU with only 242 million transistors, as opposed to 514 for the RV730 which is used with the 4670/4650. Obviously some significant compromises have been made, with a 64-bit memory interface, 16 Vec5 calculation units, 8 texturing units and 4 ROPs, while the RV730 has a 128 bit memory bus, 64 calculation units, 16 texturing units and 8 ROPs.
Although these cards have a superior spec to the most recent IGPs, they won’t really be any good for gaming, as they wont be fast enough for pretty much all current generation games at res of up to 1280 x 1024.
So what are they good for? Fanless and with power consumption of under 20 watts, UVD2 support allows H.264/VC-1/MPEG-2 acceleration as well as an 8-channel LPCM over HDMI audio output, making these cards ideal for PC Home Cinema, even if the most recent IGPs ought to give it the run around here! Pricewise, AMD has announced the Radeon HD 4350 256 MB at $39 and the Radeon HD 4550 512 MB at $59.
