And there's more
More, more, more!
As you would expect, there's more of everything in Radeon HD 46x0 than in the HD 36x0. More math throughput, higher texel processing, greater bandwidth, and, what you can't see, improved per-clock performance for antialiasing and depth/stencil work.Perhaps the only thing holding the new design back from setting records in the £50 bracket is a lack of memory bandwidth, forced by the narrow bus width. Otherwise, performance would be consistently close to, if not beating, the Radeon HD 3850's.
The HD 4-series harnesses an improved UVD engine that adds in better DVD-upscaling, dynamic contrast, and dual-stream video decode, matching NVIDIA's PureVideo3 HD.
Looking across to the competition, NVIDIA's pricing reshuffle has brought GeForce 9600 GT and 9600 GSO into the frame. Both are considerably better than the GeForce 9500 GT, which will compete against the Radeon HD 4650. Gobs of texturing and decent math ability makes them formidable if their respective price drops any further.
Summary
On paper, Radeon HD 46x0 brings together a similar number of performance benefits that HD 48x0 gained over the previous 3-series cards. That's hardly surprising, though, as the mid-range 4-series is, practically, a direct derivation of what makes the larger-die GPUs tick along.ATI's gone about reducing cost in an obvious and sensible way, hitting price-points that should provide decent gaming at the 1,280x1,024 resolution. NVIDIA's method, in the main, seems to be one of rebranding older higher-end SKUs to new nomenclature and not adding a whole heap else from a hardware point of view.
On the software side, however, NVIDIA has been making advances with its CUDA and PhysX technology, and it would be remiss of us to evaluate a graphics card without due note of the supporting environment.
