Introduction

Today AMD releases the first 40 nm GPU in the world. Their new RV740 graphics processor powers the HD 4770 Series which is targeted at the sub-$100 segment. Rather than focusing on a small volume in high-end graphics, AMD has realized that a lot of people want cheap, affordable graphics that still can play most games out today.

RV740 is heavily based on Radeon HD 4850/4870/4890 technology. For example we are seeing GDDR5 memory on the card. Since RV740 comes only with a 128-bit memory bus interface, GDDR5 can show huge improvements because it effectively doubles the memory bandwidth. So RV740 with 128-bit GDDR5 has the same bandwidth as 256-bit RV770 with GDDR3 (HD 4850).

Architecture-wise RV740 is identical to other member of the RV7xx Series, there are no changes. This means that the GPU comes with support for DirectX 10.1 and UVD 2 HD Video Decode Acceleration.