Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB OC

Conclusion:

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC costs about $10~15 USD less than the Radeon HD 4670, which works out to be about 15% less for this budget graphics card, but when using OverDrive we had no problems beating the HD 4670 when it came to the frame-rate performance in all of the Linux OpenGL tests. The factory-overclocked HD 4650 was generally within a few frames per second of the HD 4670, but once squeezing a few more megahertz out of the RV730PRO core and video memory it had no problems running up against the RV730XT. In the 2D GtkPerf testing, the performance was roughly the same between all of the ATI graphics cards tested.

Sapphire's Radeon HD 4650 OC does cost about $20 USD more than the Radeon HD 4550, but in the OpenGL tests it was twice as fast (and in some cases, even more) as the RV710 GPU. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC had also annihilated the GeForce 9500GT, which is the direct NVIDIA competition in the same price range, in our Linux tests. With the GeForce 9600GT, which now costs just about $10~20 USD more than the HD 4650 OC, it had delivered significantly better performance. The NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT was faster than both the Radeon HD 4650 OC and HD 4670 on Linux. Due to the X Render improvements within recent NVIDIA driver releases, it also had more pleasing GtkPerf results.

NVIDIA now also has the advantage of delivering PureVideo features on Linux through their Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) implementation. As our VDPAU benchmarks showed, this significantly improves video playback performance by offloading most of the work to the graphics processor rather than the CPU. AMD is working on X-Video Bitstream Acceleration for Linux that takes advantage of the Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD2), but the longer they wait in delivering a solid XvBA implementation, the more that it will hurt them. Just in the past few days MythTV picked up support for VDPAU, which is making budget NVIDIA cards a more appealing choice to those using Linux for media PCs.

Where ATI/AMD though has the advantage is certainly with the open-source support not only with the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers but also with the Mesa stack for open-source 3D support (although the 3D R600/700 support is currently bogged down with legal issues). NVIDIA on the other hand, provides no real open-source support aside from an obfuscated xf86-video-nv driver.

If you are currently deciding between the Radeon HD 4550, 4650, and 4670, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB OC graphics card would be a great choice. Its performance is significantly better than the Radeon HD 4550 and is comparable to that of the HD 4670 when overclocking. This graphics card has low power requirements, runs cool, and we encountered no Linux problems during our testing.

For pricing information and additional reviews on ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics cards, visit TestFreaks.com.