ATI Radeon HD 5670 Performance Preview

Everyone seems to be picking on the Radeon HD 4670 these days.

When they launched the GeForce GT 240 at the end of last year, NVIDIA was quick to compare their latest mainstream GPU to the Radeon 4670. Even though the $99 GeForce GT 240 was priced closer to the Radeon 4770 than the 4670, that didn’t stop NVIDIA from declaring victory in GT 240 pre-launch promotional materials, and as our benchmarks showed, NVIDIA’s claims were for the most part true. The GeForce GT 240 was definitely the faster card.

Now ATI’s getting in on the action. With today’s arrival of the Radeon HD 5670, ATI’s quick to compare its performance to that of the Radeon 4670 and GeForce GT 240. ATI says that the 5670 is faster than both, with the additions of DirectX 11 (including DirectCompute 11), Eyefinity, and HDMI 1.3a with Dolby True HD and DTS Master Audio (which the GT 240 also supports). And while the 5670 was originally designed to be the true successor to the Radeon 4670, there’s only one small problem: the 5670 is priced at $99.

Did no one at ATI or NVIDIA get the memo that the Radeon 4670 currently starts at about $70?



Getting the Radeon 5670 out the door is an important achievement for ATI though, as it gets them into another price bracket. You could argue it’s the most important bracket of all. You see, the Radeon 5670, previously codenamed “Redwood” is intended to service the mainstream market. According to the latest figures from Mercury Research, 66% of the discrete graphics market consists of cards that sell for less than $100. The $100-$200 graphics segment trails by a factor of 2X at 27% overall.

The card is the fourth release in ATI’s “Evergreen” family of DX11 GPUs. Last September ATI introduced Cypress, which was used in the Radeon 5800 series GPUs, while Juniper (Radeon 5700 series) and Hemlock (Radeon 5970) followed quickly in November. Today ATI’s introducing Redwood, and the latest rumors suggest that Cedar (which we’ll also be previewing today) could come as soon as next month.

It’s beginning to look like ATI will offer a top-to-bottom range of DirectX 11 cards before NVIDIA gets their first DX11 card out.


Like other Evergreen cards, the Radeon HD 5670 is built on TSMC’s 40-nm manufacturing process and consumes very little power as a result – at idle the card draws just 14W.

Its most notable feature though is without a doubt, DirectX 11. But does it have the horsepower to run cutting edge titles with good performance? Let’s take a look at the nuts and bolts that make up the Radeon 5670…