AMD Radeon HD 4770 On Linux

The latest addition to AMD's Radeon HD 4000 series (R700) family is the ATI Radeon HD 4770 graphics card, which was released in late April. We finally have our hands on this graphics card which uses the RV740 -- the first 40nm GPU -- and have proceeded to run our usual assortment of Linux-based tests. Along with the transition from a 55nm to 40nm process, the Radeon HD 4770 has been designed to bridge the current R700 solutions to their next-generation graphics processors that will be introduced later this year. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 may cost less than $100 USD, but it packs serious performance capabilities.

The launch of the Radeon HD 4770 (RV740) came just a few weeks after the launch of the Radeon HD 4890 (RV790). The HD 4890 is of course AMD's fastest single-GPU solution while the HD 4770 is positioned to be a mainstream part that packs a performance punch and outperform NVIDIA's GeForce GTS 250 and GeForce 9800GT graphics cards. The 40nm RV740 is clocked at 750MHz with an 800MHz clock for its GDDR5 video memory that has a 128-bit memory bus. On top of that, for this GPU that has approximately 826 million transistors, there are 16 ROPs, 32 texture units, and 640 shader units. While the Radeon HD 4850 was the first TeraFLOPS GPU, the Radeon HD 4770 is capable of just 960 GigaFLOPS, but that's nearly 30% more than what can be found with the Radeon HD 4830 and double that of the Radeon HD 4670.

Sapphire Technology was the company that sent out our AMD Radeon HD 4770 512MB review sample. Sapphire is one of the ATI AIBs we have extensively dealt with and have used many of their products. While Sapphire's products have yet to highlight any Linux support on their packaging or incorporate any Linux drivers on their product CD, if you are shopping for an ATI Radeon graphics card, Sapphire Technology is one of the brands we would recommend.