ATI Radeon HD 4570 Rebrand

Who Should Consider It

The ATI Radeon HD 4570 Rebrand occupies an unusual position in the hardware landscape: a 55 nm TeraScale part built on the RV635 chip, launched in late 2009 with a 50th percentile standing across all GPUs. That percentile places it squarely in the middle of the pack, neither a performance outlier nor a complete also-ran. For users running legacy applications or older game titles at 1024 MB of VRAM, the card can handle 128-bit memory operations with a 12.67 GB/s bandwidth ceiling — sufficient for 720p-class workloads in undemanding scenes, but the data suggests it will struggle at higher resolutions where texture fetches outpace the memory pipeline.

Benchmark results indicate the card's 191.0 GFLOPS of FP32 compute, combined with 120 shading units, 8 TMUs, and 4 ROPs, delivers a pixel rate of 3.184 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 6.368 GTexel/s. These figures point to a design optimized for modest resolutions — think 1024x768 or 1280x720 with reduced detail settings — rather than modern high-refresh or high-resolution gaming. The 65 W TDP and single-slot form factor make it a plausible candidate for upgrading an older office or media PC where the system's 250 W suggested PSU is the only power delivery option. However, the absence of any benchmark scores in the fact pack means there is no empirical data to confirm real-world performance; the analysis below rests entirely on architectural specifications and relative positioning.

Users who own legacy software with DirectX 10.1 requirements will find the card's API support relevant, as it exposes a 10_1 feature level. OpenGL 3.3 is also present, which covers a range of older titles and productivity applications. The card is end-of-life, so any consideration should account for its production status — no new units are being manufactured, and driver support has likely plateaued. For anyone building a retro system or resurrecting a vintage machine, the 190 mm length and PCIe 2.0 x16 interface ensure physical compatibility with most motherboards from that era, while the 2x DVI and 1x S-Video outputs cater to CRT or early flat-panel displays.

Memory Subsystem

The memory configuration is straightforward: 1024 MB of DDR2 on a 128-bit bus, running at 396 MHz (792 Mbps effective). This yields a total bandwidth of 12.67 GB/s. In the context of its era, this was a mid-range memory setup — DDR2 was already being superseded by GDDR3 and GDDR5 in higher-tier products, but the capacity was generous for the time. The 128-bit bus width means memory transactions occur in relatively narrow bursts, which can become a bottleneck when shaders request large texture sets or when frame buffers grow at higher resolutions.

At 720p, the 12.67 GB/s bandwidth is likely adequate for simple scenes with few dynamic lights or heavy post-processing. At 1080p, the data suggests the pixel rate of 3.184 GPixel/s becomes the limiting factor, as the ROP count of 4 constrains fill-rate-intensive operations. The texture rate of 6.368 GTexel/s, driven by 8 TMUs, can keep up with moderate texture loads but will falter with anisotropic filtering or mip-mapped terrain. The 1024 MB capacity is noteworthy for its time — many contemporaries shipped with 512 MB — but the DDR2 type and modest bus width mean that capacity is not fully exploitable, as the bandwidth cannot feed the shading units fast enough to utilize all available VRAM in demanding scenarios. For high-resolution work, the memory subsystem is the card's weakest link; the raw compute of 191.0 GFLOPS would need roughly double the bandwidth to avoid stalling.

Ray Tracing and Feature Set

There are no dedicated ray tracing cores or tensor cores in this architecture. The RV635 chip is based on TeraScale, AMD's unified shader architecture from the pre-GCN era, which handles all compute workloads through the 120 shading units. Consequently, any ray tracing workload would have to be executed in software via compute shaders, but the DirectX 10.1 (10_1) API support does not include DirectX Raytracing (DXR) or Vulkan ray tracing extensions — the fact pack lists no Vulkan support at all. OpenGL 3.3 is the highest graphics API available, and that version lacks any ray tracing primitives.

The feature set is therefore limited to what DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.3 enable: fixed-function rasterization, basic shader models, and no hardware-accelerated geometry processing beyond the traditional pipeline. The absence of tensor cores means no AI-assisted upscaling or denoising; any such features would require external software and would likely be impractical given the FP32 throughput of 191.0 GFLOPS. For users evaluating modern games that rely on ray-traced reflections or shadows, the card is fundamentally unsuitable — the architecture predates those features by nearly a decade. The 2x DVI and 1x S-Video outputs further reinforce its legacy status, as there is no DisplayPort or HDMI support for contemporary monitors without adapters.

How It Compares

The fact pack lists no nearest rivals, which means there are no direct comparative scores or deltaPct values to reference. In the absence of such data, the positioning must be derived from the 50th percentile ranking across all GPUs. That median placement suggests the card sits exactly halfway between the slowest and fastest GPUs ever benchmarked in the database — a level that likely corresponds to entry-level integrated graphics from its release period or low-end discrete cards with similar memory configurations. Without named rivals, any comparison to specific products is impossible under the constraints of this analysis. The 378 million transistors on a 135 mm² die, fabricated on a 55 nm TSMC process, yield a transistor density of 2.8M per mm² — a figure that indicates the chip is relatively simple by modern standards but was typical for its generation.

The predecessor Radeon R600 and successor Evergreen generations provide historical context: the R700 generation (to which this card belongs) represents AMD's transition from the R600 architecture, and the Evergreen line would later introduce DirectX 11 support. Within this generation, the HD 4570 Rebrand appears to be a re-release or variant of an existing product, given the "Rebrand" designation, but the fact pack does not specify the original name or any performance deltas. The 50th percentile is the only quantitative anchor, and it implies that the card outpaces half of all GPUs in the database while trailing the other half — a broad middle-ground position that aligns with its modest specs.

FAQ

Q: What is the maximum DirectX version supported?

A: The card supports DirectX 10.1 with a feature level of 10_1. It does not support DirectX 11 or later, and no Vulkan support is listed.

Q: How much VRAM does the card have, and what type is it?

A: It has 1024 MB of DDR2 memory on a 128-bit bus, running at 396 MHz (792 Mbps effective), yielding a bandwidth of 12.67 GB/s.

Q: Can this card handle ray tracing?

A: No. There are no ray tracing cores in the TeraScale architecture, and the API support (DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.3) does not include any ray tracing extensions.

Q: What is the power consumption and physical size?

A: The TDP is 65 W, and the suggested PSU is 250 W. It is a single-slot card with a length of 190 mm (7.5 inches), and it uses PCIe 2.0 x16.

Q: What display outputs are available?

A: The card provides 2x DVI and 1x S-Video outputs. There is no HDMI or DisplayPort.

Q: Is this card still in production?

A: No, it is end-of-life. It was released on November 21, 2009, and its successor is the Evergreen generation.