Price war: Bargain ATI graphics card for gamers serves notice to Nvidia

Computerworld - ATI Technologies Inc.'s new Radeon HD 4770 graphics processor launched earlier this week, receiving plaudits for incorporating cutting-edge technology at a ground-breaking price.

The 4770 GPU, used in add-in graphics cards, is the first graphics chip to use 40-nanometer technology. 40nm is a more miniaturized technology than the 55nm silicon used in most other graphics processing units (GPU). All things being equal, that allows a GPU to incorporate more transistors for faster performance while running cooler and drawing less power.

The 4770 boasts 826 million transistors powering 640 cores, or what ATI calls "stream processors," running at 750 MHz. That delivers close to 1 teraflop (960 GFLOPS) of performance while consuming a maximum of 80 watts of power.

Multimillion-dollar supercomputers with thousands of CPUs didn't start to pass 1 teraflop until the late 1990s.

By comparison, 4770 graphic cards will cost $109 when they are released, with a limited-time $10 mail-in rebate from ATI, an Advanced Micro Devices Inc. subsidiary, bringing the price down to $99.

Some third-party testing has the Radeon HD 4770 beating more expensive competitors from rival Nvidia Corp.

According to tests conducted by graphics chip market research firm Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the ATI chip beat a high-end Nvidia Geforce 9800 GTX in raw performance (using 3DMark Vantage scores). The 4770's margin of victory was heightened when price and energy usage were also factored in (cards using the Nvidia chip range from $130 to more than $300).

"The Radeon 4770 is an amazing amount of product for an amazingly low price," wrote Robert Dow and Alex Garovi, analysts at JPR. "It will set a new standard for the industry and challenge low-price suppliers like Matrox and VIA/S3."

ZDNet blogger Adrian Kingsley-Hughes went further, calling the 4770 and its $99 price the "new 'high end' for GPUs."

The HD 4770 is "as far as most gamers are concerned, the highest-end graphics card they need," Kingsley-Hughes wrote.

The Radeon HD 4770 could provide a much-needed boost for ATI. ATI's first-quarter chip shipments were down 27.5% year over year, according to JPR, giving it 17.1% of the market, behind Nvidia's 31.1% and market leader Intel's 49.7%.

Intel's leadership comes from its domination of the larger integrated segment of the GPU market. It won't launch its first GPU for more-powerful add-in cards, Larrabee, until early next year.

Nvidia still leads the add-in graphics card segment. Boards using chips such as its GTX 295 cost $500 or more.

Nvidia called the idea that hard-core gamers will be satisfied with a $99 card ridiculous.

"You of course would be limited in performance at high resolutions, features and additional functionality outside of traditional 3-D game rendering, namely things that use the GPU for other purposes -- transcoding, video manipulation, protein folding, physics calculations, etc.," wrote an Nvidia spokesman in an e-mail.