AMD Officially Launches ATI Radeon HD 4830 GPU

Earlier this week we reported that Radeon HD 4830's were being spotted, now today AMD made it official with their Press Release announcing their new HD 4830 GPU at less than $150.

“The ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card is another example of how AMD’s scalable design strategy is paying off,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “With a single chip we have been able to quickly and efficiently bring to market graphics card designs ranging from below $150 through $549 SEP, with leading performance in every segment. The ATI Radeon HD 4830 continues that great trend, providing tremendous value to gamers for less than $150.”

“The $100-$150 graphics card price band represents the ‘sweet spot’ of the desktop PC graphics market where the consumer gets the most graphics performance per dollar spent,” said Dean McCarron, founder and principal, Mercury Research. “This is where the latest graphics technologies reach the mainstream PC audience, and this is the level that most PC games target.”

Resetting the performance bar below $150
The ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 graphics card delivers outstanding value to gamers. With the launch of this card, even the most intimidating games that were previously unplayable on a graphics card selling for less than $150 can now be enjoyed at playable frame rates, even when using image enhancements such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.2 For those gamers looking to get even more performance out of their gaming rigs, ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 cards support ATI CrossFireX™ technology allowing gamers to combine as many as four cards in one PC.3

Phenomenal HD multimedia experience
More than just a gaming card, the ATI Radeon HD 4830 offers up exceptional HD multimedia performance as well. All ATI Radeon HD 4800 series cards allow users to enjoy HD digital content4 with uncompromising visual fidelity while helping to enhance the definition and clarity of lower resolution visual media. AMD’s second generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2.0) ensures users experience smooth HD video playback, and sharp, crisp images and vibrant colors through ATI Avivo™ HD technology. Combined with capabilities like picture-in-picture, and support for the latest HD audio technologies like 7.1 surround sound, the ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card serves up an impressive cinema-quality home entertainment experience.

ATI Radeon HD 4830 - GPU Specifications:

956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
- Shader Model 4.1
- 32-bit floating point texture filtering
- Indexed cube map arrays
- Independent blend modes per render target
- Pixel coverage sample masking
- Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
- Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
- 640 stream processing units
  - Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
  - Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
  - Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
- 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
- Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
- Shader instruction and constant caches
- Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
- Up to 128 textures per pixel
- Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
- DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
- High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
- Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
- Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
- Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
- Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
- Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
- Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
- Accelerated physics processing
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
- High performance vertex cache
- Programmable tessellation unit
- Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
- Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
- Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
- Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
- Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
- Gamma correct
- Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
- All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
- 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
- 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
- sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
- Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
- Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
- Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
OpenGL 2.1 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform¹
- Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
  - High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video²
  - Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support
  - DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support
  - Support for BD-Live certified applications
- Hardware DivX and MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
- ATI Avivo Video Post Processor¹
  - Color space conversion
  - Chroma subsampling format conversion
  - Horizontal and vertical scaling
  - Gamma correction
  - Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
  - De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  - Detail enhancement
  - Color vibrance and flesh tone correction
  - Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
  - Bad edit correction
  - Enhanced DVD upscaling (SD to HD)
  - Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
- Two independent display controllers
  - Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
  - Full 30-bit display processing
  - Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
  - Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
  - High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
  - Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
  - Fast, glitch-free mode switching
  - Hardware cursor
- Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
  - Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)³
  - Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content⁴
- Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
  - Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536³
- DisplayPort output support
  - 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x1600³
- HDMI output support
  - All display resolutions up to 1920x1080³
  - Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3, AAC, DTS⁵, enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
- Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
  - Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
  - Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
  - Underscan and overscan compensation
- Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
- VGA mode support on all display outputs
ATI PowerPlay™ Technology⁶
- Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
- Performance-on-Demand
  - Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
  - Clock and memory speed throttling
  - Voltage switching
  - Dynamic clock gating
  - Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology⁷
- Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
- Integrated compositing engine
- High performance dual channel bridge interconnect