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
Crysis: Warhead
Kicking things off, we’ll start with Crysis: Warhead. Warhead is still the single most demanding game in our arsenal, with cards continuing to struggle to put out a playable frame rate with everything turned up.
Update: As a few of you pointed out, there was something a bit off with our Crysis results; we had a Radeon 4850 beating the 5770. As it turns out we wrote down the maximum framerate for the 4850 instead of the average framerate. None of the other results were affected, and this has been corrected. Sorry, folks.
There are a few different situations we’re going to be interested in. The first is the matchup between the 5770, the 4870, and the GTX 260. The second is the matchup between the 5750, the 4850, and the GTS 250. The third is the 5770 as compared to the 5800 series, in order to see what another $100 or $200 is buying you in the Evergreen family.
Unfortunate for the 5770, this is not a game that treats it well. In spite of the clock speed advantage over the 4870, and the architectural advantages (extra caches and what-not), it underperforms the 4870 by about 15% here. AMD had once told us that they believed that they weren’t memory bandwidth constrained on the 4870/4890, but when that’s the only significant difference between the 5770 and the 4870 that would explain the performance difference (certainly Juniper wouldn’t be slower than RV770), we are beginning to doubt that. Meanwhile the GTX 260 outscores the 5770 here too.
Looking at the 5770 compared to the 5850, $100 buys you roughly 50% more performance.
The 5750 fares much better here. It beats the 4850 by 10%-20%, and beats the GTS 250 by a similar margin.
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flipmode - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
What in the world is going on with this game? 8800 GT beats the 4850? No, sorry, I don't buy that. Something is wrong here. The 5770 beats everything? If that is the case, then this game should immediately be removed from the bench suite - games in the bench suite should help us understand the general performance characteristics of the hardware and a game that returns such erratic results actually distorts that understanding.Griswold - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
On page 13 you say:"The 3870 beats it by 14W at the cost of a significant degree of performance, while the 8800GT is neck-and-neck with the 4770, again with a decent-sized performance gap."
You certainly meant 5770 there. But this brings me to a question: Why isnt the 4770 included here? As an owner of that card, I'm very much interested in the performance/power/noise difference - just ditch one of the relatively irrelevant SLI or CF combos. I dont think too many care about comparing high-end multi-GPU with performance parts such as the 5770 and 5750, even if its 57xx in CF.
flipmode - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Ryan - thanks so much for the review. Nice job. It does seem like a 5750 Crossfire would be an interesting value - moreso than the 5770 since the latter is overpriced.And, Anand, I love your site, and don't take this personally, but, PLEASE GET A COMMENT SYSTEM THAT DOES NOT TOTALLY SUCK!
Check out TechReport for an example of the awesomest comment system in the universe.
PLEASE!
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
AMD only sent out 1 5750, so I don't have a second one to Crossfire at this time.Roland00 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
It makes no sense (beside bad drivers) for the 5770 to lose to the 4850. The 5770 has more memory bandwidth (76.8) compared to the 4850 (63.55 gb/s), due to the 4850 sticking with ddr3, even with the 128 bit bus. The 5770 is also clocked 36% faster than the 4850 (850 vs 625).Yet the 5770 underpeforms the 4850 being almost tied?
Zool - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Maybe the 4*64bit memmory controlers on the perimeter of the chip keep up the data better than 2*64bit controlers with higher bandwith.I think that they could make it at least 192 bit (3*64bit).
Zool - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Actualy where the hell are the Cypress and Juniper die shots ?I cant find a single one on net.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
AMD is not releasing die shots.dgz - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Looks to me like AMD is trying to lure people into buying the remaining 48** cards. Once the old chips are cleared, the price of 57** will no doubt drop.GrizzlyAdams - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
What really has me concerned is how the 5870 is scaling in these tests.The 5870 core is essentially two 5770s strapped together, and you would hope scaling would be near linear. When two 5770s in crossfire match or even beat a 5870 I'm left scratching my head.
Somewhere there is a significant bottleneck in the 5870's design, and I'm wondering where that is. Anyone have any clue?
Hopefully a driver update will fix these issues, because if not there is a lot of wasted silicon on each of these chips...