Specs and synthetics

We've already discussed how the 4770 compares to a couple of its siblings, but here's a broader look at the specifications of recent video cards. Note that these numbers are, where applicable, derived from actual clock speeds of the cards we've tested; some of them stray from the baseline clocks established by the chipmakers.

That's not the case with our Radeon HD 4770, though. Even so, you can see that the 4770 has a higher pixel fill rate than the GeForce 9800 GT, and depending on whether you count the G92's dual-issue capability or not, nearly two or three times the peak shader FLOPS. The 9800 GT leads by a pretty clear margins in terms of memory bandwidth and texture filtering capacity, but the RV700-series GPUs tend to overachieve on this front compared to their specs.

In fact, the 9800 GT almost catches the 4770 in the pixel fill rate test, and the 4770 takes a lead in the texturing benchmark.

The shader benchmark results are closer than you might think given the disparity in theoretical capacities, but the 4770 only ties the 9800 GT once, in the GPU cloth test, where the GeForces do especially well. The 4770 runs the board otherwise, signaling that its shader superiority isn't just on paper.