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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Spoelie - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
The difference is obviously the memory bandwidth. It seems to me that ATi should have gone with a 192bit bus, this change alone would have made the HD57x0 a worthy successor to the HD48x0 range, without any performance caveats, while still being significantly cheaper to manufacture (40nm vs 55nm, 192bit vs 256bit).Skiprudder - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
I'm guessing your right, but I'd like to see Anand (or Ryan) do one of the track-down-the-engineers that this site is famous for, and hear the rational on AMD's part.CarrellK - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Anand knows where I live...CarrellK
futrtrubl - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Or even just overclock the memory and see how performance scales. That would provide some evidence for the memory bottleneck theory.plague911 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
At this price point it looks like the 5770 & 5750 are priced to pad AMD's pockets, not to provide increase performance (not that, that's a bad thing when in a war with Intel). With the smaller process size and smaller chip size and similar performance each new part sold will net AMD a substantialy higher profit. This is why AMD will likely kill off the older gen instead of droping the price point.MadMan007 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Yes I think that's where my mild disappointment comes from. Not that they aren't great cards for the launch MSRP, they just aren't great in light of street prices, but unlike HD4800 or even arguably HD5800 AMD doesn't seem interesting in shifting the price/performance curve with these cards. At best matching the current price/performance curve leaves me a bit cold.MonkeyPaw - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
That's been the trend from ATI lately with their mid-grade cards. The 5700 series is meant to offer roughly the same performance of the 4800 series for a cheaper price. The 4600 series last time was meant to match the 3800 series (the 4770 was quite an oddball though). It's not a bad system, really, as it allows ATI to migrate their lineup with some consistency.Lonyo - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
It might be that some of the cost does indeed come from the RAM though.Once GDDR5 chips drop some more, it will be easy for AMD to drop the prices on these cards, but that might (might) be what's limiting pricing options.
Or AMD just want to try and get maximum profit from these cards.
But even so, when GDDR5 prices drop it will be easier to extract profit at lower prices, so GDDR5 pricing will still be at least partly responsible.
geok1ng - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Reading the charts it gets obvious that it is upgrade time: lets get 4850s, 4870s, and even 4850X2-4870X2 on the next weeks before these cards phase out: they are faster and a LOT cheaper than the 57xx series. As for the high end consumers, just wait for the 5870X2, now that is a card to roll eyes, when and IF it launches.codedivine - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
This is relevant only for compute folks like me, but does 57xx support double precision?