AMD’s Radeon HD 5770 & 5750: DirectX 11 for the Mainstream Crowd
by Ryan Smith on October 13, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Far Cry 2
Far Cry 2 is another foliage-heavy game. Thankfully it’s not nearly as punishing as Crysis, and it’s possible to achieve a good framerate even with all the settings at their highest.
Update: When we first published this article, we had some anomalously high results for the 5770 at 1680 and 1920. We have found the reason for this and corrected it. This brings the 5770's scores down by 10fps or so.
Compared to Crysis: Warhead, Far Cry 2 paints a better picture for the 5770. Here it just manages to beat out our 4870, which may be slightly disappointing for those of you that are expecting a decisive victory over the 4870, but it's better than a loss like in Crysis. The GTX 260 is also neck-and-neck with our two Radeon cards here.
Far Cry 2 also paints an interesting case for the 5750 in comparison to the 4850. Far Cry 2 likes RAM, particularly on AMD cards. With the 1GB on our 5750, it doubles the terrible performance of the 4850. This is going to be the exception to the norm here though.
Finally, with the solid performance of the 5770, a 5850 buys around 40% performance improvement here.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
I don't like to make a habit of disagreeing with Ryan, but unfortunately only Cypress based cards support double precision. The 57xx series does *not* support double precision.Take care,
Anand
MadMan007 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
So where is the double precision implemented? I didn't bother too look it up by I imagine it's buried deep in the shaders. If so why take it out? Is it just disabled or not present at all? If not present I guess I could see removal for the sake of fewer transistors but otherwise it seems like artificial market segmentation. On the other hand hardcore compute power people where time = $$ won't have a problem getting a 5850 or better, or seeing what NV does.CarrellK - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
DPFP (Double Precision Floating Point) is physically not in the Juniper GPU - it is not artificial segmentation. We had to choose between giving you a GPU that would be great for consumer HPC and games at a price you could afford, or something that cost notably more.There are virtually zero consumer applications that need DPFP.
CarrellK
stmok - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
According to ATI's Stream SDK v1.4 page...Desktop cards that support double precision: Radeon HD 3690, 3830, 3850, 3870, 3870 X2, 4770, 4830, 4850, 4850 X2, 4870, 4870 X2, 4890.
Mobile GPUs that support double precision: Mobiliy Radeon 3850
3870, 4850, 4850X2, 4870
None of their IGPs support it.
Their newer Stream SDK 2.0 series (currently in Beta 4), mentions they now support OpenCL in GPU, and that the Radeon HD 5870, 5850, 5770, and 5750 are supported. No mentioned of which can actually do double precision though...
Still, considering the 5770 looks similar in spec to the 4870/4850, it may support it. (The major difference seems to be the Memory Bus Width.)
Come to think of it, what are the requirements to support double precision on a Radeon HD-series GPU?
codedivine - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Thats sad :( .. thanks for the info!Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
My understanding is that it's available in the entire Evergreen lineup. So I'm going to give you a tentative "yes".codedivine - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Thanks!endlesszeal - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
As always from anandtech, great review. However, I almost crapped my pants when I saw the price of a "display port to dvi" dongle," $100?? Hope thats not the average not inflated by Apple price. =)Zingam - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
You don't really need that dongle anyway.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Actually, the Apple adapter is still the only active adapter I'm aware of that's widely available. So yes, that $100 is because of the Apple price.