The New ATI Lineup

As the ATI lineup takes better shape, it becomes apparent that like Nvidia before them they are trying to have something for everyone. This market saturation brought Nvidia shouts of disdain from both the community and resellers as their lineup was far too confusing for the average consumer but ATI has taken a fundamentally different approach. Instead of releasing cards across two different series at the same time (like the boys in green did with the 8 and 9-series), Team Red has now almost completely discontinued the 3xxx-series in favor of the 4-series architecture. However, there are still 3-series cards on the market at various price points and this causes an unfortunate overlay with the new 4-series. We wouldn’t be surprised to see some 3-series cards like the HD 3870 stick around for a little while longer to not only clear out stocks but also retain an ATI presence in the $100 to $200 price bracket.

Speaking of that magical $100 to $200 price bracket, there is amazingly little ATI can offer since the HD 4600-series is priced below $100 while the next-level HD 4850 is sitting pretty between $180 and $200. Granted, the HD 3870’s technology is getting a bit long in the tooth and performs relatively poorly against the 9600GT and 8800GT, but it is all ATI has for now. Hopefully this will change but until then hopefully ATI can get retailers to cut down on pricing a bit since $150 and more for an HD 3870 is far too much in our books. Then again, ATI MAY just have something else up their sleeves...


Enough about all that, let’s get on to the cards this review is all about: the new HD 4600-series. Both the HD 4670 and HD 4650 are based off of the 55nm RV730 core which is a scaled-down version of the powerful RV770 core we have been seeing tearing up the charts with the HD 4870 and HD 4850. Naturally, performance will be significantly decreased through the use of less than half the RV770’s 800 Stream Processors but ATI has balanced this out by equipping the HD 4670 with reasonably fast DDR3 clocked at 2Ghz for the 512MB version and 1.8Ghz for the 1GB card. Meanwhile, the HD 4650 gets a pretty large cut in the specs over the HD4670 with a lower core clock and DDR2 memory clocked at 1Ghz.

As we mentioned in the introduction, the immediate competition for each of these cards is the new 9500-series from Nvidia. Naturally, the HD 4670 in its GDDR3 form is being lined up against the 9500 GT GDDR3 while the lower-end DDR2 versions go head to head as well. Looking at things from a pricing perspective, it seems like ATI has a slight advantage by giving their new entry-level cards SRPs about 10% lower than the competition. It would not surprise us one bit if Nvidia lowers their prices to match but that all depends on performance now doesn’t it?