ATI Radeon HD 4730

Benchmark Performance

The ATI Radeon HD 4730 occupies a distinctly middling position in the historical GPU landscape. With a 50th percentile ranking against all GPUs ever tracked, the data places this card squarely in the median tier of performance. However, the benchmark database contains no direct score entries for this part — the `avgBenchmarkScore` is recorded as 0, and the `nearestRivals` array is empty. This absence of quantitative rivals means the analysis must rely on the card's own architectural specifications and its percentile standing to infer its capability envelope.

The HD 4730 is built on the RV770 chip, the same silicon that powers higher-tier Radeon parts of its generation, but it is substantially cut down. The chip houses 956 million transistors on a 256 mm² die, fabricated on TSMC's 55 nm process. This yields a transistor density of 3.7 million per square millimeter. The card delivers 960.0 GFLOPS of FP32 compute, which is the raw mathematical throughput available for shader work. In the context of its era, this figure positions it as a mainstream performer, not a flagship. The pixel rate of 6.000 GPixel/s and texture rate of 24.00 GTexel/s further define its fill-rate boundaries. These numbers indicate a card that can handle 2009-era titles at modest settings, but the 50th percentile ranking suggests it was already trailing the upper half of the GPU population at the time of its release.

The card's TeraScale architecture, with 640 shading units and 32 texture mapping units, is paired with only 8 ROPs. This asymmetric configuration is telling: the shader throughput is relatively high, but the ROP count bottlenecks pixel output. In practice, this means the HD 4730 could compute complex shader effects but would struggle to push high resolutions with anti-aliasing enabled, as the 8 ROPs would become the limiting factor. The 50th percentile ranking reinforces the view that this was a budget-oriented part, not a performance segment contender.

Power and Cooling

The HD 4730 carries a TDP of 110 W, a figure that directly informs the cooling and power delivery requirements. AMD specifies a suggested PSU rating of 300 W, which is modest by modern standards but was typical for cards of this class in 2009. The board requires a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, and the card occupies a dual-slot cooling solution. The physical dimensions are 241 mm in length, which translates to 9.5 inches, making it a long-ish card for its performance class but one that should fit in most mid-tower cases of the period.

The 110 W TDP means the card generates a moderate amount of heat, necessitating the dual-slot cooler. The data does not specify the cooler's design details, but the dual-slot footprint suggests a substantial heatsink and fan assembly. For system builders, the 300 W PSU recommendation is a hard floor — pairing this card with a weaker supply would invite instability. The single 6-pin connector is a standard feature for this power class, requiring no adapter in most PSUs of the era. The power delivery architecture is straightforward, with no exotic multi-rail requirements. The 55 nm process, while not as power-efficient as later nodes, kept the TDP within the bounds of what a 300 W supply could handle alongside a mainstream CPU.

Memory Subsystem

The memory configuration is one of the HD 4730's most distinctive characteristics. It ships with 512 MB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus, running at 900 MHz (3.6 Gbps effective). This produces a memory bandwidth of 57.60 GB/s. The choice of GDDR5 was forward-looking for the time, but the 128-bit bus width severely constrains the potential bandwidth. By comparison, wider-bus cards of the same generation could achieve significantly higher throughput, but the data does not include those figures here.

For high-resolution gaming, this memory subsystem presents a clear bottleneck. The 512 MB capacity was already marginal for 2009-era titles at 1080p, where texture-heavy scenes could exceed that allocation. The 128-bit bus compounds the issue: even with GDDR5's high effective clock, the narrow interface limits how much data can be moved to and from the frame buffer. The 57.60 GB/s bandwidth is sufficient for 720p gaming and older titles, but at higher resolutions, the card would likely experience texture thrashing and stuttering as the GPU waits for data. The 8 ROPs, combined with this bandwidth figure, paint a picture of a card that is best suited to 1024x768 or 1280x1024 resolutions, where the memory traffic demands are more manageable.

The pixel rate of 6.000 GPixel/s is directly tied to the ROP count and the memory clock. At 900 MHz memory clock, each ROP can process a limited number of pixels per second, and the 128-bit bus further restricts the data flow. For users targeting 1080p, the HD 4730 would require reduced texture quality and minimal anti-aliasing to maintain playable frame rates. The 512 MB frame buffer also limits the ability to use high-resolution texture packs, which were becoming common in games from 2009 onward.

How It Compares

The `nearestRivals` data is empty, which means there are no directly comparable scores or delta percentages available for this card. This absence is itself informative: the HD 4730 sits in a performance class where the database has not tracked any direct competitors. The 50th percentile ranking against all GPUs provides a general sense of position — it is neither a low-end part nor a high-end part, but rather the exact midpoint of the distribution.

Given the lack of rival data, the comparison must rely on architectural positioning. The RV770 chip is shared with higher-tier cards, but the HD 4730's shader count of 640 units and 32 TMUs are reduced relative to more fully enabled RV770 variants. The 8 ROPs are a significant reduction, suggesting this card was designed to be a cut-down version of a more powerful chip, with the memory bus also halved to 128 bits. In the broader Radeon R700 family, the HD 4730 would have sat below the more fully featured parts, but the empty rival list prevents a precise quantitative comparison.

The 50th percentile ranking implies that half of all GPUs in the database outperform it, and half underperform it. This places the HD 4730 in the same ballpark as many older mainstream cards, but without rival names and scores, the analysis cannot be more specific. The data does not include any benchmark scores for this card, so the percentile is derived from the card's specifications relative to the database's overall distribution. This is a qualitative placement rather than a measured result.

Who Should Consider It

The HD 4730 is an end-of-life product, having been released in June 2009 and now marked as production-discontinued. Its 50th percentile ranking and the absence of benchmark scores make it a hard sell for modern gaming. The 512 MB GDDR5 frame buffer and 57.60 GB/s bandwidth are insufficient for 1080p gaming with contemporary titles, which routinely require 2 GB or more of VRAM and bandwidth in excess of 100 GB/s. The 960.0 GFLOPS FP32 compute is also far below what modern game engines expect for shader work.

For 720p gaming with older titles, the card could still be functional. The 6.000 GPixel/s pixel rate and 24.00 GTexel/s texture rate are adequate for games from 2009 and earlier, especially with settings turned down. However, the 8 ROPs would limit performance in any scene with heavy overdraw or post-processing effects. The card supports DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.3, which covers games from that era, but lacks Vulkan support entirely. This means any modern game that requires Vulkan would not run at all.

The launch MSRP was 79 USD, and the card was clearly aimed at budget builders. The 110 W TDP and 300 W PSU recommendation make it easy to integrate into an older system with a modest power supply. The PCIe 2.0 x16 interface is backward-compatible with modern motherboards, but the performance ceiling is so low that it would bottleneck any modern CPU. For retro gaming enthusiasts building a period-accurate 2009 system, the HD 4730 could be a viable choice, provided they stick to 1280x1024 or lower resolutions and accept medium-to-low settings. For any other use case, the data strongly suggests that more modern alternatives would offer better performance, though the database does not list them here.