First rv730 review up (4600 series)

http://en.expreview.com/2008/09/02/rv730-reviewed-prforms-close-to-3850/

Since not everyone is going to crawl through that huge article Ill sum up some interesting points.

320 shaders (same as rv670)
128-bit (this is what is holding this card back but also contributes to its small dye size and low power draw)
around the performance of a 3850 512mb in games without AA
crippled by the memory bus in synthetics

and here is the big one:
no external power plug = 75 watt max power draw

expected MSRP is:
HD4650- $70-$80
HD4670- $90-$100

These cards should make a big splash in the budget market and sell well to low res gamers as well as htpc owners.

ATi could use gddr5 to make up for the 128bit bus and really make these cards fly but at this point gddr5 is to expensive to put on these cards.

4650 sounds like a nice HTPC/low budget gaming solution.

here is a pic of the card. Note that there is no external power connector and it has 2x hdmi and 1x dvi

dam!! that looks like a nice market!

i think this is ATI "revamped" AIW card so to say, 2 HDMI ports and all! man this is going to HTPC like mad!!

does NVIDIA have anything to counter?

depends on what these cards end up costing. The 9600gt and 8800gs/9800gso could be competative in performance but would need price drops to match these new cards. Also even though nVidia could drop prices to match ATi these cards cannot be matched with regards to power draw and connectivity at this level of performance with anything on nVidia's roadmaps.

yes but those cards dont have:

1. HDMI ports
2. Likely Audio over HDMI either

Good move by ATI, very nice.

They should make a 4700 series with 500 SPs, that would probably do well on the market, so long as the memory bus was right.

so basically... OC the mem as much as you can to unbottleneck the core...

I was hoping for performace between 3850 & 3870. Maybe I will wait until there is a gddr4 version of this card. The no power connector is HUGE for me though. Priced around $85 would be perfect.

I only upgrade my video card once a card is the same power as my old card or less, double in performace, and under $100. This should do it

i bet in around 2 months we start seeing GDDR5 versions of this card for around $25 more which will perform 10-20% better than these.

its interesting that this proves my assumption that these new super ROPs were not all they were cracked up to be. people were operating under the assumption that the reason the RV770 does not perform around 2.5x as fast as the RV670 was due to smaller and less powerful unified shaders. But the RV730 uses the same shaders as the RV770 just with less of them. the RV730 uses 320 shaders as with the RV670 and if these were weaker units then it should perform noticeably slower...it doesn't. i would say the reason the 800 shaders and 40 TMUs in the RV770 do not perform around 2.5x as fast as the RV770 is due to the low(16) amount of ROP units.

Its nowhere near as simple as that. Architecture changes are not as simple as glueing on more rop, shaders, TMUs, etc for more performance. Also it is very important to note that these cards are 128bit where as every other card you where talking about is 256bit.