A year or two ago, ATI would have released its latest technologies on the world in the form of a hyper-fast, high-end graphics card that would have cost a fortune, but with the release of the HD4770 it has changed all that, as not only does this card have a world's first 40nm GPU, it is also aimed at the lower end of the mainstream market.

And it has super-fast GDDR5 memory as well. All this in a card that comes in under the £80 mark.

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Because the HD4770 (codename RV740) is built on the 40nm process it has two distinct advantages over its siblings; more dies can be produced from a silicon wafer therefore reducing costs, and because of its smaller size it consumes less power, producing less heat and therefore the clock speeds can be increased.

The HD4770 has 826 million transistors on its new 143.75mm² die compared with the 956 million of its two nearest siblings, the HD4830 and HD4850. It has 640 stream processors, the same as the 4830 but less than the 4850's 800. These processors run at the same speed as the core clock: 750MHz, which is faster than both the HD4830 (575MHz) and the HD4850 (625MHz).