DiRT 3

For racing games our racer of choice continues to be DiRT, which is now in its 3rd iteration. Codemasters uses the same EGO engine between its DiRT, F1, and GRID series, so the performance of EGO has been relevant for a number of racing games over the years.

With DiRT 3 AMD finally turns the tables on themselves, leading to the 7770 taking a lead over the 6850. With an 8% lead this is the first win for the 7770, and a surprising one at that. Throw in a factory overclock like the BESDD and even the 6870 can be surpassed. In fact the only real bad news for the 7770 here is that while AMD is beating themselves, it’s a competition that NVIDIA normally wins, leading to the 7770 still trailing the 1GB GTX 460 and sitting well behind the GTX 560. The interplay of three different architectures here means that no one is necessarily going to be the winner all of the time.

As for the 7750, the 7770 gap only continues to grow. Now the 7770 is 32% ahead of the 7750, indicating just how important shader and texturing performance is in this game. The end result is that the 7750 still slightly trails the 5770.

As good as overall DiRT 3 performance is, the minimum framerates look even better. The 7750 finally edges out the 5770, meanwhile the 7770 nearly ties the 6870.

Metro: 2033 Total War: Shogun 2
Comments Locked

155 Comments

View All Comments

  • rdh - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    Bingo. But your numbers look at if you were to want to buy today. You might have bought the 5750 or 5770 at a significantly lower cost during a sale in the past 2.5 years. So individual price comparisons may be different than today's prices.

    IN ADDITION: the 7770 and 7750 require about 3% less power and produce frame rates about 10% higher than their 57xx counterparts. This is after the 57xx have been out for nearly TWO AND HALF YEARS. I purchased both (the 5750 for one system at $65 and the 5770 for another at $99) about 6 months after introduction. Two years later, there is no compelling reason for me to upgrade. That means AMD is only going to be selling these to new desktop purchasers.... a quickly shrinking market. This cannot be good for AMD.
  • CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link

    Since fps is your only metric, itself being a murky and disturbed error filled easily biased mess based upon game set, driver cheating, resolutions, and in game settings chosen, the entire price/perf chart is EPIC FAIL.
    When your drivers crash, when your game doesn't work, when new games don't work for weeks and months, when dual card drivers are absent, when features like PhysX are no can do - NONE OF IT IS ACCOUNTED FOR....
    ---
    Obviously all amd has to do is follow the simpleton idiot fps/per dollar formula for all the stuck cursor gsod fanboys to bloviate and screech they saved 20 cents... then the amd forum masters casn continue to lock them out, lock user problem threads, and smart off that "it's works for them on their eyefinity setup theya re starig at right now"...
    ---
    When a crazed, worship filled, religious zealoutry claims the heavens have opened on the cheap and the devil competition has lost all, beware...
    Oh.. wait... sorry talking to the wrong person...
  • Roland00Address - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    I am curious how high these cards will go before they hit the powertune limits.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    I'm still writing up an addendum, but here's what I have for the 7770.

    Ref 7770: 1125MHz core, 4.8GHz memory
    XFX 7770: No meaningful overclock on top of XFX's factory overclock. Crashed at 1160MHz core

    As for performance, basically look at the XFX card.
  • Roland00Address - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    Personally I find that the more interesting card
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    We didn't do any overclocking tests on the 7750. It was necessary to quickly test it in order to be able to ship it to Ganesh for HTPC testing.
  • DarkSynergyt - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    Might be a stupid question but can the 7750 output audio over HDMI? I'm in the process of building an HTPC and this is the final piece to the build.
  • evilspoons - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    My 6570 can and I'm pretty sure they said in the review that it has all the same features as previous generations for video features.
  • ganeshts - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    Yes, it does. With full bitstreaming options too (even WMA Pro). 7.1 channel LPCM support is also there. No worries. (Of course, hot plugging [ say, moving from a direct monitor connection to an AV receiver input ] causes the audio output to act crazy, but that is the case with every card. Reboot fixes the issue)
  • evilspoons - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    This really drives home how obsolete my GTX 285 is. The 7770 has about equivalent performance and uses *130 watts* less.

    I need a new video card, but I want to see what Nvidia has for us next - I'm not a fanboy (in spite of all my gaming cards since the 3dfx Voodoo 3 being Nvidia), I'm just genuinely hoping for either some competition to drive prices down or something better to blow us away. Come on guys, get a move on already!

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now