Final thoughts
The Radeon HD 4550 3D's performance is kind of as expected, with it pretty much matching a HD 3650's. It's certainly not the leap ahead that we saw with the HD 4670, as that GPU doled out to a whipping to similar-priced previous-generation cards when launched last month.
However, we reckon that smooth gaming at 1,280x1,024 with a reasonable amount of image-quality enhancement is possible on the new HD 4550. Sure, it's significantly slower than either the Radeon HD 4670 and also not quite as quick as a GeForce 9500 GT, but it ships with a considerably smaller price-tag.
Looking across to its immediate competitor, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT, the ATI Radeon HD 4550 is the better card. You may be interested to learn that a few NVIDIA partners were unwilling to seed in the card as a comparison, knowing how it would fare, and that tells a story in itself.
It's fair to say that most prospective buyers would pay only passing notice to the gaming benchmarks, understanding that a £30-£35 card isn't going to set the world on fire, and would look towards its multimedia feature-set instead. The UVD 2.0-toting and multi-output-supporting Radeon HD 4550 may well look better when viewed in that light, based around an HTPC environment, but that's another article for another day.
Bottom line: As it stands, AMD has completed a top-to-bottom 4-series line-up with the release of the Radeon HD 4550. Performance is better than its immediate rival(s), helped by the efficiency of the architecture, but it's not the beneficiary of a massive performance jump that other 4-series cards have shown.
So if you're after a cheap discrete graphics card that makes a reasonable stab at gaming and, on paper, has strong multimedia credentials, the HD 4550 is worth a punt, especially as the base for a reasonable HTPC setup.
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AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4550 512MB
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