Okay this is gonna be a quick one. AMD has a brand-new Radeon to unveil today, and it's certainly worthy of our attention. However, we are humming away with the sound of a great many things being tested right about now, so our time to devote to this new graphics card is limited. We'll be in and out of our look at the Radeon HD 4830 in no time, faster and cleaner than a celebrity marriage. Yep, this new card is indeed called the Radeon HD 4830. The name tells you almost everything you need to know about this product, which would appear to be the last piece of AMD's Radeon HD 4800 series line-up to fall into place. Which is exactly the goal behind this special release. - TechReport

AMD Radeon HD 4830 512MB Graphics Board Review

You may recall that AMD didn't have much to offer between the Radeon HD 4670 at around $80 and the all-world Radeon HD 4850 at about $180. Well, that's where the Radeon HD 4830 comes in. This new model is, like the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870, based on the RV770 silicon, but in its tamest form yet. Yes the great product segmentation game continues with yet another chip having perfectly good bits and pieces deactivated to maintain a neat separation between models. On the Radeon HD 4830, two of the RV770's ten SIMD units have been disabled, reducing shader power and likely performance somewhat.

Since those SIMD units are tied to texture management units, the GPU's texture mapping units count has dropped proportionately. The end result, the Radeon HD 4830 has a total of 128 shader execution units or 640 stream processors, in AMD parlance and can filter up to 32 textures per clock cycle. That's it for the neutering though. The Radeon HD 4830 card keeps all four of the RV770's render back-ends and associated memory controllers intact, leaving it with an aggregate 256-bit memory interface. The card's GPU core runs at 575MHz, and it comes with 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1800MHz effective.

AMD's Radeon HD 4800 series GPU architecture has now made it into nearly every corner of the market, from the bargain bin to graphics cards costing over $500, and it's a winner at nearly every price point including this one. The Radeon HD 4830 nicely slides into the last real gap remaining in AMD's lineup and more than gives the GeForce 9800 GT a run for its money. Generally speaking, the Radeon HD 4830 proved to be a bit faster than the GeForce 9800 GT in our quick round of benchmarks. In terms of overall performance, the contest between the two cards is close enough and almost identical in terms if raw performance.

Going to a higher clocked variant of the GeForce 9800 GT could potentially tip the balance in NVIDIA's direction. But there are cases like Quake Wars, where the Radeon HD 4830 matched the more expensive GeForce 9800 GTX+, in which even a generous clock speed boost wouldn't allow the GeForce 9800 GT to keep up. Still, these cards are matched closely enough, and perform well enough in many of today's games, that we wouldn't choose between them based solely on performance. Image quality is also something of a wash, with the two major GPU makers' DirectX 10 class chips producing roughly comparable output.

AMD's slightly newer GPU architecture does have some potential advantages, including very strong performance with anti-aliasing and DirectX 10.1 support, but NVIDIA has credible alternatives in the form of its a different combined anti-aliasing mode and the promise of PhysX acceleration in future games. So we don't know, take your pick. You can't go wrong with either. Gut feeling, we'd go with the Radeon HD 4830 on the strength of its combination of speed and power efficiency, depending of course on what kind of deal we could get on it.