AMD releases ATI Radeon HD 5700 series

 

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Posted on 15 Oct 2009 at 14:47

AMD has released its new mainstream Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards, which manage to come in at more affordable price points than the flagship 5800 series.

The Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon HD 5750 are based on a new 40nm GPU with roughly half the capabilities of the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850.

The 5770 includes 800 stream processing units clocked at 850MHz and 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1,200MHz (4,800MHz effective) on a 128-bit bus, which results in half the horsepower and half the memory bandwidth of the 5870 as it shares the same clock frequencies.

Meanwhile, the 5750 also includes 1GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus, but this time it's clocked at 1,150MHz. The number of stream processing units has also been cut back too, as there are now just 720, which run at a reduced 700MHz.

Both cards share the same feature set as their more expensive brethren, which means full support for DirectX 11, for improved visuals via tessellation and a number of new graphical effects, as well as EyeFinity, which lets you connect up to three displays to the card at Full-HD resolutions for multi-monitor gaming.

Of course, this is less useful for cards such as these, but the support is there should you wish to run multiple monitors to increase your productivity in desktop applications. EyeFinity enables you to set up groups of monitors to allow your applications to span across them seamlessly. One provision is that you will need at least one DisplayPort enabled monitor, as limitations in the graphics chip's display engine prevent you from using the dual DVI ports and HDMI at the same time.

We put the new Radeon HD 5770 to the test and it performed well. In our Crysis benchmark, which uses the high settings, the 5770 scored 33.6 fps at 1,680 x 1,050 with 4xAA applied. It also managed 41 fps at 1,440 x 900 at the same settings. In Call of Duty 4, the 5770 achieved an average of 66.6 fps at 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA and 78.5 fps at 1,440 x 900 4xAA - both with the highest in-game settings enabled. We also ran 3DMark Vantage at 1,680 x 1,050 and the 5770 returned a score of 5,538.

The 5770 compares well to its most direct competition from the 4870 and GeForce GTX 260-216, which performed similarly to the 5770 in our game tests. The GTX 260 has a slight edge in 3DMark Vantage, where it scored 5,752, but on the whole it performs where it should. The Radeon HD 4890 is a little faster than the 260 and 5770 though, so it's not a clear cut choice for the 5770 on performance alone. However, if features and future proofing are important, there's only really one choice in this price bracket now.

We'll be having a look at the Radeon HD 5750 as soon as we get a card in our labs for long enough to put it through its paces. The new 5770 and 5750 cards will retail at around £120 and £90 inc VAT respectively and are available from UK retailers now.