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
Final Words
Wrapping things up, I once had someone comment to me that they can gauge my opinion of a product based solely on the first paragraph of the final page. If I say “there’s no such thing as a bad card, only bad prices” then it’s likely not a favorable review. That statement is once more being validated today, if only in a meta context.
To be clear, we’ve been waiting for some time to see GCN filter down to lower priced cards, and even longer to see PowerTune in particular make it down here. The fact that we now have reliable power throttling and solid compute performance is not lost on us. It’s a welcome advancement.
However our expectation with a new manufacturing process – and perhaps we’re being greedy here – is that we’ll see cards become cheaper and we’ll see power consumption come down. AMD has achieved the second item in spades, and as a result both the Radeon HD 7750 and Radeon HD 7770 are well ahead of any competing 75W and 100W cards respectively. The 7750 in particular is a standout thanks to the fact that it generally offers 5700 series performance on a sub-75W card, and even at $109 it clearly offers a great deal of value as an HTPC video card. All of this will be an even more welcome change when Cape Verde filters down to laptops in the coming months.
The problem for AMD today isn’t the power/performance curve, it’s the price/performance curve. 16 months ago AMD launched the Radeon HD 6850 at $179 amidst fierce competition from NVIDIA. Ignoring the current price of the 6850 for the moment, on average the 7770 delivers 90% of the 6850’s gaming performance for 90% of the 6850’s launch price. In other words in 16 months AMD has moved nowhere along the price/performance curve – if you go by launch prices you’re getting the same amount of performance per dollar today as you did in October of 2010. In reality the 6850 is much cheaper than that, with a number of cards selling for $159 before a rebate, while several more 6870s sell for $159 after rebate. The 7770 is so far off the price/performance curve that you have to believe that this is either a pricing error or AMD is planning on quickly halting 6800 series production.
Now to be fair there’s more to consider than just performance in existing games. The 7770 supports DX11.1, VCE, PowerTune, Fast HDMI, and other features the 6800 series doesn’t have, and it does all of this while consuming around 25W less than the 6850. But that’s just not enough. DX11.1 is a point update that’s still the better part of a year away and will only offer a tiny number of new features, while VCE is AWOL and cannot be evaluated, and Fast HDMI will be a niche feature for use with extremely expensive TVs for some time to come. This is not like the 4000/5000 series gap – today and tomorrow the 7000 series will only offer marginal feature benefits. The best argument for the 7770 is the power difference, but considering that both the 6850 and 7770 require external power anyhow that 25W difference is unlikely to matter.
The 7700 series is a fine lineup of cards, but AMD has finally shot itself in the foot with its conservative pricing. The 7750 can ride on the sub-75W niche for now, but the only way the 7770 will make any sense is if it comes down in price. Until then AMD’s worst competition for the 7700 series is not NVIDIA, it’s their 6850.
With that said, the 7700 series clearly has potential. XFX’s R7770 Black Edition S Double Dissipation does a great job demonstrating this with its virtually silent operation, while the card’s factory overclock largely closes the performance gap with the 6850. With its combination of performance and power consumption the 7700 series will be AMD’s midrange workhorse for 2012, of that there is no question. Now it’s simply up to AMD to make it so. After all there’s no such thing as a bad card, only bad prices.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
155 Comments
View All Comments
KaDomoT - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Soemthing went very wrong during your Skyrim testing. I ran a 6870 in a similar rig (X4 955 @ 3.5ghz, 4gb ram, no ssd) @ 1920x1080 with 4x AA / 16x AF and A LOT of texture mods and my fps was MUCH higher than that. Not only that, but this was before the big performance boost in patch 1.4 / before I had even heard of SkyBoost!Admittedly my card was overclocked a good chunk (955 core / small mem oc) and my cpu had 600mhz on yours but no way that accounts for some massive 35+ fps difference especially when you guys have the performance patch and no mods.
takeship - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
I think what everyone is missing here is that neither the 7750 or 7700 is really a card for builders, but for the OEM system builders, local shops, etc. For that segment, these cards are fastastic. Just look at the power and thermal loads - if you're HP, now you know you can sell the end customer a 7750 "HD Video" build for cheap, or a push the upgrade to 7770 based "HD Gaming" system without changing the power supply or cooling! That's huge for those guys. Simplification of the assembly line, part variety, etc etc. Same thing with Dad at home. Kid wants to play Battlefield? Buck at the shop around the corner knows that 7770 will get him there and then some playing on their "old" 1080p monitor without worrying that he'll see them back in 4 months when the system melts.CknSalad - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
I think it's best to wait for kepler. There's really no point to be an early adopter of ati's 28nm cards. I'm sure the price will be fixed as the way it should comparable to nvidia's offerings. I just hope that nvidia is really taking the time to actually make quality gpus that are fairly mature. I wonder when there will be stable, legitimate drivers for ATI's 28nm cards. Hopefully that will give a decent boost in performance.haukionkannel - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Well this seems to be the trend. Older cards allways seems to better in bang for the buck department.It has been very slow time in GPU selling, so there are a lot of those old 5xx and 6xxx cards, so they have to sell those out before they can recure the prices for these new... Or nobody would buy those older allready produced cards. It is pity to us consumers, but a must to GPU manufacturers.
At this moment there is allmot none reason for AMD to make old 6xxx series cheaper, because the Nvidia is not making enough pressure. So they release new cards at extreme prices and sell those old card first.
Nogib - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
I have been looking for an upgrade for my 4850 512MB card with a similar great bang for the buck that this card has given me all these years. Guess I'm still going to be looking. 7770 is close, but not enough of a leap to be honest. And while I'm sure the 78xx series will be great, I'm guessing it will be at a $250-$299 price range which is far beyond what I would ever consider spending on a video card. Sigh.Mathos - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
You're right about the price/performance thing for a release.But, you also have to take some things into consideration. Some of the performance difference is likely due to the 6800 cards having a 256bit memory bus, as opposed to 128bit. Even with that standing I'm amazed the 7770 gets as close as it does. The main reason the 7770 is more expensive, I'm thinking is more likely so they can cease production on the 6800 series and dump inventory. The 68xx cards have been out for a while, and have benefited from many driver optimizations, but, you're not likely to see any more performance out of them from driver updates than what they already have. The 77xx cards are still based on a new core, which through driver updates will likely get much better performance over time.
Bottom line for me though, is, does it perform better than the 5770 that I currently have. Which, it does so considerably. More than could be said for the 6770. It also makes me wonder if they aren't gonna end up doing a 7790, basically a cut down pitcairn with a 256bit bus, like they did with the 6790.
chizow - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
lol Hi rarson. :)Looks like you almost get it. Don't worry once the 7800 parts launch it'll fill in the blanks for you. The entire 7-series product stack pricing fails, top to bottom.
marc1000 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
actually the 7850 is the real star here. a board that does not require pci-e power and is able to almost match the 5770 in performance on most of the games. that was a 100w card.in the other hand, this makes me a little worried about the power requirements of 7800 series. i am hoping that both 7850 and 7870 will require only 1 pci-e power plug. my case is not big enough to handle more heat than that, and this is why i dont upgrade to a GTX560 (2x power connectors).
mczak - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
I think for the 7850 there is a possibility it would only have 1 power connector.The expectation is that Pitcairn is roughly "2xCape Verde", which means it should have roughly twice the power draw too. Twice the 7750 power draw is easily under 150W, whereas twice the 7770 power draw is not (well close actually according to measurements, but clearly these cards want to allow powertune +20% settings and overclocking).
That would be similar to HD6850/HD6870 where the 6850 only has one pcie power connector but the 6870 has two.
marc1000 - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
i meant 7750 is the star here.