It is about that time again where the next release of Windows, Windows 7 will be released with a new API, DirectX 11. Microsoft will launch Windows 7 on October 22nd which is the successor to Windows Vista. ATI has quietly been showing their next generation video cards, codenamed Evergreen at Computex and at the recently concluded QuakeCon. It will likely launch the next generation around the same time as the Windows 7 launch. As we move further into the summer more details will crop up.
ATI launched the HD 4890 video chip earlier this year in April and today it is one of the bestselling video cards in the world with cards available at the same price point as the GeForce GTX 275 or lower and offering similar performance but more features (DirectX 10.1). The HD 4890 is available online for as low as $213, making it one of the better deals in terms of price/performance. ASUS sells a lot of video cards based on both NVIDIA and ATI chips and this review is on the ASUS EAH4890/HTDI/1GD5/A card.
Features
- ASUS Splendid
- GamerOSD
- VideoSecurity
- SmartDoctor
- Exclusive Voltage Tweak Technology
- 1GB GDDR5 memory
- 256-bit memory interface
- 850MHz core clock
- 975MHz memory clock
- HDMI output
- PCI Express and PCI Express 2.0 support
- HDCP compliant
- Dual-link DVI support
- ATI PowerPlay
- Up to 3x overclocking margin and 10C lower GPU temperatures (ASUS designed board)
- Luxurious Super ML Cap for up to 20% GPU noise reduction (ASUS designed board)
- Specially designed fan sink
- Ultimate armaments with the finest component selection (ASUS designed board)
- 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
- 800 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 128 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)
- 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
- Physics processing support
- 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 superior 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 2.0 support
- ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform1
- 2nd generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2)
- Enabling hardware decode acceleration of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
- Dual stream playback (or Picture-in-picture)
- Hardware MPEG-1 and DivX video decode acceleration
- Motion compensation and IDCT
- ATI Avivo Video Post Processor1
- Enhanced DVD up-conversion to HD
- 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
- Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
- Bad edit correction
- Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
- Full score in HQV (SD) and HQV (HD) video quality benchmarks
- 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 DVI display outputs
- Primary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2
- secondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)2
- Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3
- Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
- Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15362
- DisplayPort™ output support
- Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16002
- Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 KHz stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less
- audio solution4
- HDMI output support
- Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10802
- Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including PCM, AC-3, AAC, and DTS, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution over DisplayPort (or HDMI depending on section)
- 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™ Technology4
- 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 Technology5
- Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two GPUs
- Integrated compositing engine
- High performance bridge interconnect
| Brand Name | ASUS |
| Part Number | EAH4890/LHTDI/1GDD5/A |
| Graphics Chip | RV770 Pro |
| Core clock | 850 |
| Shader Clock | 850 |
| SPs | 800 |
| Fabrication Process | 55nm |
| Transistors | 958 million |
| Memory clock | 3900MHz effective |
| Memory bus | 256-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 124.8GB/Second |
| Memory Size | 1024MB |
| ROPs | 16 |
| Texture Filtering Units | 40 |
| Texture Filtering Rate | 219.2 Gigatexels/second |
| HDCP Support | Yes |
| HDMI Support | Yes (via adapter) |
| Connectors | DVI-I, VGA, TV-Out |
| RAMDACs | 400MHz |
| Bus PCI Express | 2.0 |
| Form Factor | Dual Slot |
| Power Connectors | 6-pin, 8-pin |
The EAH4890/HTDI/1GDD5/A card is clocked at 850MHz for the core and 975MHz (3.9GHz effective for the memory, the standard clocks for the HD 4890 series. The chip it is based upon the RV790 XT is done on TSMC’s 55nm fabrication process. The chip has 959 million transistors on a die that is slightly bigger than the HD 4870’s. The extra transistors go towards a decoupling capacitor ring that encircles the ASIC allowing reduced signal noise when higher frequencies are used compared to the HD 4870.
The HD4890 has 800 Stream Processors, the same number as on the HD 4870. The 4890 is capable of 160 5D operations in a single clock cycle, meaning it has over a TeraFLOPs of computing power at an 850MHz clock speed. ATI has coined the term Stream Computing for Physics based computing on their cards and the HD 4890 can do 1.2TeraFLOPS of computing on the card. The ASUS video card runs at 850MHz for the core, 975MHz for the memory. This is the same frequencies as the default reference card. GDDR5 memory gives twice the bandwidth as GDDR3 memory at the same frequency. This means that though the card has a 256-bit memory interface, the memory bandwidth is a very respectable 124.8GB/second. ASUS outfits the card with 1GB of memory meaning the card will be able to handle high resolutions without issue in games. The memory runs at 3.9GHz effective speed.
ATI’s big push with their HD 4xxx series was the support for Microsoft’s DirectX 10.1. There are several DX10.1 supporting video games on the market including Tom Clancy’s HAWX, Stormbringer and more coming as we move further into 2009. ATI has had DirectX 10.1 support on their video cards since the launch of the HD 3870. Their competition just recently released DirectX 10.1 supporting video chips in the form of some NVIDIA laptop and desktop chips. As mentioned earlier in the Introduction, the next iteration of DirectX, DirectX 11 will be launched with Windows 7.
ASUS exclusive features include Splendid, GamerOSD, SmartDoctor, Video Security, Exclusive Volt Tweak modifications ASUS Splendid is a video enhancement technology that uses Pixel shaders to reduce CPU workload in playing back video, produce vivid colors and offer more image detail in images. GamerOSD (On Screen Display) allows real-time changing of the clock speeds of the graphics card, film capture and screenshot capture. ASUS SmartDoctor monitors graphic chip temperatures, fan speed and voltage, notifies the user about irregular hardware events, smartly cools the graphic chip when temperature exceeds the threshold temperature, automatically adjusts the fan speed, and allows manual adjustment of GPU core and memory clock.
The first thing that one notices when looking at the new ASUS card is the fact that ASUS has gone with a dual fan cooling design. The front fan is a little bigger (90mm) than the rear fan (80mm) with each fan having 11 fins. The fans are contra-rotating, in other words one fan will spin one way the other will spin the other direction. This provides adequate cooling for the RV770XT graphics chip even when overclocked. There are also six heatpipe helping to keep the card cool.The HD4890 is a PCI Express Generation 2.0 card. This means it is meant to operate on a PCI Express x16 slot and offers up to 8GB of bandwidth between the chipset and the graphics card. This is double the bandwidth offered by a PCI Express x16 slot from the 1.1 specification. The card is about as long as the reference HD 4890. One change to the card is the inclusion of both an 8-pin and a 6-pin power connector on the back of the card. Reference design HD 4890s has two 6-pin power connectors, meaning that the card draws more power than the reference card. Two Crossfire bridges adorn the top of the card allowing for up to four HD 4890s to be installed in one system. The card uses Super ML Caps which promise to deliver up to 300% overclocking margins over other cards.
The card has two Dual Link DVI-I outputs. These can drive LCD monitors up to 2560x1600 on each. HDMI is supported via adapters one of which is included in the packaging. You can also install analog monitors with adapters, again one of which is included with the bundle. The last connector on the rear I/O bracket is a HDTV Out which allows you to connect your HDTV to the card. Note that many HDTVs use HDMI and you can connect the HDTV through the adapter to the DVI output.
Gaming
The HD 4890 is currently the best card from ATI and while ASUS cards plays games among the best in the business. Tom Clancy HAWX game is one of the first DirectX 10.1 games on the market. This game uses DirectX 10.1 to increase performance on the game on cards that support it. The game plays well on the HD 4890 with high frame rates throughout.
Crysis Warhead is the prequel to one of the most graphically intensive games of all time, Crysis. The original game still gives nightmares to hardware owners with less than stellar systems today. The HD 4890 ploughed through this game with ease, with frame rates that topped 30+ fps at 1650x1080 which is fully playable almost through the entire game.
Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood is the latest game from the makers of the original game released a couple of years ago. The sequel has the McCall brothers go through a series of shootouts and a deep storyline spanning many years. The game uses DirectX 10.0 effects with the Chrome Engine 4 from Techland. The HD 4890 from ASUS plays this game with little difficulty with maximum settings up to the maximum resolution.
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