Introduction

You have to give the ATI/AMD crowd a lot of credit considering about a 1 to 1-1/2 ago they could barely do anything right and now we then both riding high on the success of the 4800 series graphics card as well as the newly released AMD Phenom processor which is causing quite a stir at the local computer emporiums that visit on a regular basis. Sitting back sucking on a Mountain Dew it is fun to listen to the people still balk at paying half a mountains salary for decent i7 processor and having to turn around and pay $300.00 for the cheapest i7 motherboard available.

What is stirring up the most chatter is the people that used to be died in the wool Intel fans. Now that they are hearing the scores that the ATI cards are posting they minds are changing a bit as to the which video card to go after. One thing that is helping them make up their minds in the fact that you can get a video card that would have been high-end last year for about $79.00 today.

This brings us to the HD 4670 video card we are reviewing today. It is a sub-$100 video card and it will allow a person to play most games on the market today albeit with a reduced sittings,

Specification and Features

The new SAPPHIRE HD 4670 GDDR4 has been production engineered by SAPPHIRE to bring new levels of performance to the mainstream previously associated only with high end cards. With its 320 stream processors and carrying 512MB of GDDR4 memory the SAPPHIRE HD 4670 GDDR4 is now the best product in its class. Clock speeds are 750MHz for the core and 1100MHz (2.2GHz effective) for the memory making this the fastest HD 4670 card available. The card is cooled by a new large diameter fan based cooler which keeps noise levels to the minimum (<20dBA). Optimized GDDR4 design Ultra Low Noise Cooler(<20dBA) DirectX® 10.1 320 stream processing units 128-bit memory interface 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering Dual mode ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance PCI Express® 2.0 support Dynamic geometry acceleration Game physics processing capability   SAPPHIRE HD 4670 512MB GDDR4 PCI-E   Redefine HD Gaming 320 Stream Processing Units Enough power to tackle the most demanding HD games and applications. Microsoft DirectX®10.1 Play today while preparing for tomorrow with state-of-the-art DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities. Enhanced Anti-Aliasing (AA) & Anisotropic Filtering (AF) High performance anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing (4X AA) smooth jagged edges and create true-to- life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features ATI CrossFireX™ Technology ATI CrossFireX™ technology with up to quad GPU support offers superior scalability so your system is ready to level up when you are. PCI Express 2.0 Support for PCI Express 2.0 will prepare you for bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications. Go Beyond HD Video Unified Video Decoder 2 UVD 2 frees up your CPU for other tasks so you get The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for the most processing- intensive content. Take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture capabilities. Accelerated Video Transcoding(AVT) Edit and transfer your videos to a portable video player with new Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT) technology.1 Upscale Beyond 1080p Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p display resolution and beyond.2 Enhanced DVD Upscaling Watch standard DVD movies in near high-definition quality with DVD upscaling.3 The GPU uses post processing algorithms to enhance standard and low resolution videos and movies on your HD display. Dynamic Contrast Dynamic Contrast automatically adjusts the contrast and brightness during scenes to consistently deliver a crisp, vibrant picture. HDMI Enjoy the latest audio technologies using HDMI with 7.1 digital surround sound support. Also, xvYCC support allows the user to enjoy a wider range of color when connected to a capable HDTV. 1 Some digital rights management restrictions may apply 2 The ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series GPUs can upscale video display to 2560x1600 on dual-link monitors which is almost twice the display resolution of 1080p displays. 3 The ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series GPUs can upscale video display to 2560x1600 on dual-link monitors which is almost twice the display resolution of 1080p displays.   Break-through Efficiency Dynamic Power Managemen ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series graphics cards feature ATI PowerPlay™ technology, delivering high performance when needed and conserving power when the demand on the graphics processor is low.1 More Performance Per Watt ATI Radeon HD 4600 series deliver up to 3x the performance per watt of AMD’s previous generation GPUs.2 Energy Efficient Manufacturing Process Second generation 55nm chip uses the industry’s most energy efficient manufacturing process. 1 Some digital rights management restrictions may apply 2 The ATI Radeon™ HD 4670 delivers 8.14 GigaFLOPS per Watt, compared with the ATI Radeon HD 3650 which delivers 2.60 GigaFLOPS per Watt. System Requirements –PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard –400 Watt or greater power supply (550 Watt for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode) is recommended –Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products –1GB of system memory recommended –Installation software requires CD-ROM drive –DVD playback requires DVD drive –Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive and full 1080p display requires a 1080p-capable monitor –To enable dual mode ATI CrossFireX™ technology, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 Series graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable is required. CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable is an optional accessory on Sapphire HD4670 series Disclaimer: Product specifications subject to change without notice. Product bundle varies by countries, check local dealers for details.

What is a Unified Video Decoder

In order to enable full HD video decode on a complete range of PC graphics solutions, AMD introduced the Unified Video Decoder, or UVD, commencing with ATI Radeon's HD 2600 and ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 2400 family of products, and continuing with later ATI Radeon HD 3000 series. UVD is a dedicated video decoding block that facilitates the full, bit accurate, decoding of VC-1 or H.264/AVC encoded video. Figure 1 shows a functional diagram of the decoding stages of UVD.

Click to Enlarge

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering is one of the most popular new image quality and realism-enhancing features of the latest games. It makes use of specialized data formats to more accurately capture the full range of brightness and color that the eye can perceive.

Working with HDR requires high performance, full precision floating point rendering capability. Since HDR data formats can contain more information than standard quality data formats, they demand generous amounts of memory and bandwidth. The new generation of GPUs should be ready to handle these demands. It is also very important that they be capable of HDR rendering together with other established image quality techniques, such as anti-aliasing.

One nice thing about HDR, now that they have the issues worked out of it you can now enable HDR and run 6xAA at the same time give you absolutely stunning results and causing the folks at Nvidia to growl a little bit.

AVIVO (Advanced Video in and Out)

ATI has come upon an idea that when you stop and think about it makes a lot of sense. The idea I am referring to is AVIVO, Advanced Video In and Out. ATI has decided that to make the most of video experience we need some way to control it from the minute it enters our PC until it leaves it our enters into the end-to-end process also known as the video pipeline.

Click to Enlarge

Some of the key capabilities delivered by Avivo are:

• The Media PC experience: tuner-enabled PCs entering the living room and becoming the premier consumer electronics device for TV and PVR (personal video recorder) functionality
  
  
• The Digital TV revolution: Digital, over-the-air broadcasting is taking hold worldwide. The ability to receive and playback these signals will be central to future media PCs
  
  
• HD-Disc playback: Next-generation blue-laser optical discs such as Blu-ray and HDDVD are on the horizon. Avivo enables their use on the PC with advanced decoding capabilities
  
  
• Digital Photography and Digital Imaging: with digital imaging becoming an integral part of people's professional and personal lives, it becomes important to deliver a flexible, flawless experience to even the most demanding user To highlight just one of the features of AVIVO we can take a look at a two different screen captures, one of them was done using and older low quality 9 or 10 bit Analog to Digital Converter and the other picture is done with the Avivo 12-bit Analog-to-Digital conversion.

What is Crossfire X

With the release of the Radeon X1950 Pro (RV570 GPU), ATI has completely revised CrossFire's connection infrastructure to further eliminate the need for past Y-dongle/Master card and slave card configurations for CrossFire to operate. ATI's CrossFire connector is now a ribbon-like connector attached to the top of each graphics adapter, similar to nVidia's SLi bridges, but different in physical and logical natures.[5] As such, Master Cards no longer exist, and are not required for maximum performance. Two dongles can be used per card; these were put to full use with the release of CrossFire X. Radeon HD 2900 and HD 3000 series cards use the same ribbon connectors, but the HD 3800 series of cards only require one ribbon connector, to facilitate CrossFire X.[6] Unlike older series of Radeon cards, different HD 3800 series cards can be combined in CrossFire, each with separate clock control.

Since the release of the codenamed Spider desktop platform from AMD on November 19, 2007, the CrossFire setup has been updated with support for a maximum of four video cards with the AMD 700 chipset series 790FX chipset the CrossFire branding was then changed to "ATI CrossFire X". The setup, according to internal testing by AMD, will bring at least 3.2x performance increase in several games and applications which required massive graphics capabilities of the computer system, the setup is targeted to the enthusiast market. A later development include a dual GPU solution that was released in early 2008, the "ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2", featuring only one CrossFire connector for dual card, four GPU scalability.

Packaging

The front and rear of the shipping carton has a picture of everyone's pixel heartthrob, the one and only Ruby, also on the front of the case is a placard that lets you know that inside the carton you are going to find a "Ruby ROM" which has some games on it along with demo to show-off the capabilities of the video card. Since this video card has an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) Interface it also has 7.1 channel surround sound capabilities. With two of these cards you have the option of running them in Crossfire Mode. This card also have Crossfire X capabilities, so what is that exactly? Here is what ATI has to say about it.

ATI CrossFireX™ is the ultimate multi-GPU performance gaming platform. Enabling game-dominating power, ATI CrossFireX technology enables two or more discrete graphics processors to work together to improve system performance. For The Ultimate Visual Experience™, be sure to select ATI CrossFireX ready motherboards for AMD and Intel® processors and multiple ATI Radeon™ HD graphics cards.

ATI CrossFireX technology allows you to expand your system’s graphics capabilities. It allows you the ability to scale your system’s graphics horsepower as you need it, supporting up to four ATI Radeon™ HD graphics cards, making this the most scalable gaming platform ever. Combination Options Chart

Looking at the front of the Sapphire HD4670 and you can see that they have changed the fan assembly which will cool both the GPU and the memory modules on the card. By increasing the size of the fan they have reduced the noise that it generates by as much as 20dba. One other item worth mentioning is the fact that this card is using the faster GDDR4 memory.

This card for being such a small thing has three different options when it comes to display, it starts off with the 9-pin VGA adapter and then we have the DVI adapter followed finally by the HDMI connector. You can see that on each side of the video card that the memory modules are covered by small aluminum ram sinks that will help them operate at a cooler temperature.

Included with the video card are four CD and they include and installation CD, Power DVD 7, Ruby ROM and the last one is DVD Suite.

Test Bed

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a first-person shooter video game developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision for Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, Windows, and the Xbox 360. It is the fourth installment of the Call of Duty video game series, excluding expansion packs. The game breaks away from the World War II setting of previous games in the series and is instead set in modern times. The game is the first in the series to be rated Mature in North America. The title and game details were announced on April 25, 2007.

Call of Juarez is a Western-themed first-person shooter from the Polish developer Techland. First released for Windows in 2006, it was ported to the Xbox 360 on June 5, 2007. The North American release of the PC version is one of the first games to utilize Microsoft's DirectX 10. It was released on June 12, 2007.

The June 2005 issue of PC Gamer revealed that the game uses a heavily modified version of id Tech 4 capable of rendering "huge cavernous spaces as well as more traditional passages". The game also supports the dynamic portals that were seen in the 1997/1998 video clips, which are used by friends and foes alike.

Prey also has the ability to change gravity in many parts of the game, via small items that need to be shot to become active, which is used to solve many puzzles throughout the game. Also, various landscapes in the game (large rocks, for example) have their own gravity that overrides the normal gravity in the game.

Which company do you think of when you wish to run synthetic benchmarks on your video cards, Futuremark of course and which program is used by more people than any other. - 3DMark03

Conclusion

The current price for a Sapphire HD4670 from Newegg is $89.00 and for this amount of money you can clearly see by the numbers that this card does a very respectable job of handling all of the games we tossed at it. This card does handle games very well but if you are a strict gamers there are a couple of other cards in this price range that might provide you with a slight edge when it comes to gaming.

If your plans are to use this card strictly in a HTPC setup then look now further, the nearly 20 dba noise reduction in this video card will make your DVD and Blu-Ray viewing far more enjoyable due to the fact you will not hear the constant whine of the video cards fan.

A special thanks to Sapphire Technology and a Special shoutout to Don.