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The HD 4670 is based upon ATI’s RV730 chip which is based upon TSMC’s 55 nanometer process and has 514 million transistors and a die size of 146mm2. The HD 4670 has 320 Stream Processors which is the same number as the last generation enthusiast cards from ATI, the HD 3870 cards. In point of fact, the HD 4670 has nearly doubled the transistor count on a die size under 20% bigger than the previous generation. The RV730 chip has half the number of SP cores per SIMD core, 40 instead of 80, with 8 SIMD cores in the chip for a total of 320 Stream Processors that the RV770 chip had which is the basis for the HD 4870 cards. The HD 4670 has double the texture filtering units that the previous generation high-end HD 3870 had and four times that of the HD 3650 cards in the form of 32 texture filtering units.  Crossfire bridge ATI calls their multiple graphics card solution CrossfireX. The advantages CrossfireX has over the competing solution from NVIDIA are that it can be enabled on non-ATI boards, while the majority of the boards that support SLI cannot use Crossfire and the ability to Crossfire up to four single slot video cards, meaning that four 4870s can be used together in Crossfire mode. ATI has been pushing the features of DirectX 10.1 since they started supporting the new API a year ago with the HD 3870. The previous generation sub-$100 video cards, the HD 3650 supported 10.1, but it is with the launch of the HD 4650 that the performance of the sub-$100 video cards brings HD 3870 performance to the under $100 price range that those features really become useful to the video card consumer. After all, why would someone buy a video card to support the latest features if the features are not useable? ATI has updated their Universal Video Decoder 2 which first came into being with the ATI HD 2900XT cards a couple of years back with their second generation UVD2. The new version has the ability to have two simultaneous HD streams streaming at once, for example, playing a Blu-Ray movie while watching the Director’s Commentary in the PiP (Picture in Picture) mode. The ATI HD 4000 series was ATI’s first to support Avivo HD automatic and dynamic contrast adjustment. The HD 4600 series are the first ATI cards to support integrated 8-channel audio for both HDMI and DisplayPort. Here’s a chart showing the current lineup of NVIDIA based and ATI based video cards. As you can see there is a large amount of overlap between cards that are not meant to compete against each other but will due to the ever-changing nature of the video card industry. ATI and NVIDIA would argue that comparing cards with similar pricing may be unfair, but the reality is the consumer looks at the price and performance of the video cards and while some might impose a hard cap on their purchasing others might look at the value spending a few more dollars to get significantly more performance for the money.
One thing that has improved greatly since the release of the Radeon 8500 was the driver situation at ATI. ATI now releases a new official WHQL driver 12 times a year. One consequence of this is that they are much more likely to fix a problem with drivers faster than their competition who releases drivers on a much more random schedule. ATI Catalyst drivers control the various settings of the new video card. One oddity was that when the HD 4670 was installed it was called an ATI Radeon Graphics Processor. I was able to overclock the card to 790MHz/1040MHz core/memory with the Overdrive utility found in the driver’s page. ATI Drivers       Contents: 
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