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.
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PatrickSteamboat - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
Will there be any testing on Cape Verde's Crossfire scalability in the near future? I'm really interested to see if dual 7750s can fill the gap between it and the 6950. Unlocking a hidden, low power 6900 variant, the missing 6930, without having to match and compare more than three SKUs sounds too good to be true.Roland00Address - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link
7750s can't do crossfire since they do not have a crossfire bridge.7770s can do crossfire since they have a single crossfire bridge (can't do trifire though).
PatrickSteamboat - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
Can't believe I missed... anyways, thanks for that.
I found a preliminary benchmark with dual 7770s. Numbers look great so far, but at $318 for two, I'll be waiting until I can have both for less than $279. One now @MSRP, the second discounted once Kepler is out.
mczak - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
That isn't true. 7750 don't have a crossfire connector but they can do crossfire just fine, by transferring the data over the pcie bus.According to techpowerup benchmarks which tested that there's not even really a performance hit due to that (though they used a board with 2x16 pcie lanes, albeit only pcie 2.0, so should be similar to ivy bridge lga1155 which will have 2x8 pcie 3.0, and it might be worse on sandy bridge lga1155 which only has 2x8 pcie 2.0), though they say there were some stability issues, which certainly are driver fixable.
I usually question the viability of low-end CF setups however, I think you'd be far better off with one HD7800 card instead (you shouldn't need to wait that long for it after all).
Belard - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
Its been almost 4 years since the ATI 4850 was released. Within about 6~8 months of being on the market, it became a $100~110 card.The NEW 7750 is also a $100~110 and from looking at these reviews, it performs no better than a four year old gaming card that sold for $100.
Menoetios - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
Nvidia is as much to blame for the lack of shift in the price/performance curve as AMD. That's just the nature of competition. If you look at the 7770 and 7750 pricing compared to what Nvidia currently has available, it falls right in line. AMD doesn't care that you buy a 7770 or a 6850; with the former they'll make a nice margin, with the latter it'll help clear out the channel. They only care that you buy one of their products, and their products are priced just fine to that end. With only 123 mm2 die size (it's quite tiny), the 77** cards have a lot of room to get cheaper when Kepler is released. And I hope Kepler is REALLY good, because that's when we'll see the true price/performance shift.chizow - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
How so? Nvidia is not the one pricing their next-gen parts based on last-gen performance and pricing, AMD is. If Nvidia does that with Kepler, then you they share in equal blame. But AMD had the chance to fire the first salvo this generation and they whiffed, badly, on all 3 volleys now (7970, 7950 and now 7770).Menoetios - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
AMD have set their prices according to what's available on the market from Nvidia.chizow - Friday, February 17, 2012 - link
And that's exactly the problem! They're pricing new 28nm next-gen parts based on old 40nm last-gen price and performance levels. Nvidia's pricing was justified 14 months ago because the performance was there. It would not be satisfactory if they came out with a "new" part tomorrow and priced it the same as their old parts, would it?Blame lies squarely on AMD for this because they set the pricing on their parts and they were first to market. Look at it historically over the last 2-3 major generations, never once has Nvidia done this with a new architecture (not refresh) in terms of moving the performance bar so little while expecting the same top of the line premium pricing.
Hellbinder - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link
Ok, Anand continues to amaze.. he/they are either dumber than a box of rocks or intentionally biased against AMD and simply looking for any excuse to skewer them. Personally i lean towards option number 1.The author of this review has completely buffooned the entire thing by getting the basic workings of AMD numbering & performance scaling WRONG.
yes the naming convention changed. but not in the way anand seems to think. This should be no brainier information for a site like this.
Top 7900 next 7800 next 7700 next 7500 next 7400 and so on.
The 6000 series was identical
Top 6800 next 6800 next 6700 next 6500 next 6400 and so on
the older models were different.
IF you want to compare apples to apples you compare the 6700 series to this series. The 6800 series is an entire tier above this card and should outperform it.
This site needs to get its crap together because nearly every other tech site makes this one look foolish, because they are foolish. or fire this reviewer and the editor and get some people who know what the hell they are talking about.