MSI R4770 T2D512 Radeon HD 4770 Video Card Review :: Features

• Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
• Shader Model 4.1
• 32-bit floating point texture filtering
• Indexed cube map arrays
• Independent blend modes per render target
• Pixel coverage sample masking
• Read/write multi-sample surfaces with Shaders
• Gather4 texture fetching
• Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
• 640 stream processing units
• Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel Shaders
• Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of Shaders
• Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
• 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
• Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
• Shader instruction and constant caches
• Up to 128 texture fetches per clock cycle
• Up to 128 textures per pixel
• Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
• DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
• High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
• Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
• Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
• Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
• Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
• Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
• Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
• Accelerated physics processing
• Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
• High performance vertex cache
• Programmable tessellation unit
• Accelerated geometry Shader path for geometry amplification
• Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
• Anti-aliasing features
• Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
• Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
• Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
• Gamma correct
• Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only7)
• All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
• Texture filtering features
• 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
• 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
• sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
• Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
• Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
• Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
• OpenGL 3.0 support
• ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
• Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
• High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video
• Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support
• DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support
• Support for BD-Live certified applications
• Hardware DivX and MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
• Accelerated video transcoding & encoding for H.264 and MPEG-2 formats
• ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
• Color space conversion
• Chroma subsampling format conversion
• Horizontal and vertical scaling
• Gamma correction
• Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
• De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
• Detail enhancement
• Color vibrance and flesh tone correction
• Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
• Bad edit correction
• Enhanced DVD upscaling (SD to HD)9
• Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
• Two independent display controllers
• Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
• Full 30-bit display processing
• Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
• Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
• High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
• Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
• Fast, glitch-free mode switching
• Hardware cursor
• Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
• Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)3
• Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content4
• Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
• Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536
• DisplayPort output support
• 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x1600
• HDMI output support
• All display resolutions up to 1920x1080
• Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3, AAC, DTS5, enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
• Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
• Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
• Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
• Underscan and overscan compensation
• Seamless integration of pixel Shaders with video in real time
• VGA mode support on all display outputs
• ATI PowerPlay™ Technology
• Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings Performance-on-Demand
• Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
• Clock and memory speed throttling
• Voltage switching
• Dynamic clock gating
• Central thermal management on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
• ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
• Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
• Integrated compositing engine
• High performance dual channel bridge interconnect8
• 40 nanometer process
• 750MHz core clock
• 750MHz Shader clock
• 3200MHz effective memory speed
• 128-bit memory interface
• MSI 3-in-1 High efficiency fan

The MSI card uses ATI's RV740 chip the basis for the HD 4770. The RV740 has 826 million transistors, and is the first desktop video card based upon TSMC's 40 nanometer process. This is a major process node that replaces the 55 nanometer process used on the RV770 and RV790 chips used on the Radeon HD 4890 and Radeon HD 4870 video cards. The die size of the new chip is 137mm2 which compares with the 148mm2 of the RV730 found on the HD 4670 which this card replaces.

The memory controller on the HD 4770 is 128-bit but uses GDDR5 memory. GDDR5 memory effectively doubles the memory bandwidth versus GDDR3, which means that this card has the equivalent memory bandwidth of a card with 256-bit GDDR3 memory. The memory is clocked at 800MHz, and has a memory bandwidth of 51.2GB/second. There is 512MB of GDDR5 memory on the card, making it equivalent to most mainstream cards with that amount of memory.

HD 4770 cards have 640 Stream Processors which are split into 128 5D units. The bigger brother HD 4890 has 160 5D units by way of comparison. ATI says that the HD 4770 can do 960 GigaFLOPS of computations a second, which nearly matches the performance of the GeForce GTX280 in that regard. Of course, as a gamer, the primary influence is performance during games under high settings rather than using GigaFLOPs.

ATI cards since the HD 3870 cards are the only ones on the market to support DirectX 10.1. DirectX 10.1 adds visual enhancement features to the DirectX API including improved anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. 10.1 brings support for parallel cube mapping which are features some game manufacturers have started using in games like Tom Clancy's HAWX and Battle Forge. NVIDIA cards don't support DirectX 10.1 but the number of games requiring it is small.