AMD Radeon HD 7750 & Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition Review: Evading The Price/Performance Curve
by Ryan Smith & Ganesh T S on February 15, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- HTPC
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Prior to the launch of our new benchmark suite, we wanted to include The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which is easily the most popular RPG of 2011. However as any Skyrim player can tell you, Skyrim’s performance is CPU-bound to a ridiculous degree. With the release of the 1.4 patch and the high resolution texture pack this has finally been relieved to the point where GPUs once again matter, particularly when we’re working with these slower midrange GPUs. As such, we're now including it in our test suite.
Unfortunately for the 7770, at 1680 this is another case where the 6850 is well in the lead; even XFX’s factory overclock can’t overcome the gap. At 64.3fps it’s still above the 60fps mark, but there’s clearly room for improvement. As for the 7750 it’s once again tied with the 5770.
It’s interesting to note though that at 1920 the 7700 series fares well, in fact it fares too well. 1920 is clearly hitting a memory limit for 1GB cards, and while the 5000 and 6000 series completely flounder, the 7700 series does unexpectedly well. Did AMD improve their memory allocation methods for the 7000 series? Is PCI Express 3.0 helping to alleviate the bottleneck? It’s hard to say, but clearly AMD has improved on something between the 6000 series and now.
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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....
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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"...
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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 cardRyan 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!