The Radeon HD 4670 graphics processor made itself some place in the sub-$100 graphics market. AMD's partners maintained profitability as the production costs of this accelerator remained low. Its opponent, the GeForce 9600 GSO, though available in its price-range makes it difficult for its manufacturers to sell at low price-points owing to it being based on the G92 graphics processor. Eventually, NVIDIA found a way around with releasing the GeForce 9600 GSO+ SKU, where the G94 GPU with reduced shader core count was employed. This made sure NVIDIA's partners brought in aggressive pricing to counter the Radeon HD 4670.

Sapphire on its part, put innovation to the table and attempted to spice-up the specifications sheets using the "GDDR4" moniker. The company released the first Radeon HD 4670 accelerator that uses 512 MB of GDDR4 memory across a 128-bit memory bus. The new graphics card features a shorter than usual PCB. It uses a central aluminum-based GPU cooler, with memory chips being cooled by heatsinks. The GPU is clocked at 750 MHz, with the memory clocked at 2200 MHz, a 200 MHz increment over the reference specs. It provides outputs in the form of a D-Sub, a DVI and a HDMI connector. It is priced as low as 75€.

The entry of Radeon HD 4670 did disturb NVIDIA's position, in a segment touted to be one of the cash-cow segments for both NVIDIA and AMD. It is to counter the HD 4870 in its price-range (by easing production-costs), that NVIDIA released a refreshed GeForce 9600 GSO+. The die on the GPU reads "G94-201-B1", pointing that the GPU uses the 55nm silicon fab process (9600 GSO used G92). With the reduced transistor-count on the G94 core, manufacturing the chip becomes cheaper. The real change however, is that NVIDIA made some significant changes to its shader and memory domains, hence the use of G94 core.

The shader count has been reduced from 96 on the 9600 GSO, to 48. This, by disabling 16 shaders from the G94 core. The core is clocked at 650/1675 MHz (core/shader). The GPU is allowed to use the complete width of its memory bus: 256-bit GDDR3. The card features 512 MB of memory, clocked at 1800 MHz. The memory chips featured on the Inno3D card are made by Qimonda, and have a 1.2 ns latency. The card uses a simplistic circular cooler for the GPU. It is expected to be priced at US $87.