ATI Radeon HD 5770/5750 Performance Preview December 31, 1969

ATI Radeon HD 5770/5750 Performance Preview

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DirectX 11: Sooner than you think

We’re borrowing the phrase above from ATI, as it’s fittingly accurate at describing the shift from DirectX 10 to DirectX 11. Unlike previous DirectX introductions where the API itself and supporting hardware preceded the games themselves by months, if not years, the DirectX 11 switch is moving at lightspeed. In fact, while you may not know it, the transition to DirectX 11 is already well underway.

Microsoft quietly kicked things off first with the release of the August 2009 DirectX software development kit (SDK) a few months ago. This SDK includes DirectX 11 for Windows Vista and Windows 7 gamers.

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ATI’s Radeon 5700 series: DirectX 11 for the masses

With next generation content right around the corner, gamers hoping to play these games in their full glory are going to need a DX11 graphics card. ATI’s Radeon 5870 will obviously give you the best experience, but not everyone can afford to shell out nearly $400 for a new graphics card.

Priced at $259, the Radeon 5850 delivers very good performance at a more affordable price point, but it’s still priced out of the reach of the casual gamer and mainstream audience.

This is where the Radeon 5700 series comes in. With pricing starting as low as $109 for the Radeon 5750 512MB, it’s a very feasible option for a lot of gamers on a budget. Based on the same DX11 architecture powering the Radeon 5800 lineup, the 5700 series of cards have been designed to give you all the key features found in ATI’s flagship DX11 products, only they’ve been tweaked to be cheaper to produce.

Do these tweaks cripple the card’s performance? And how well do the 5700 cards perform in comparison to ATI’s Radeon 4800 lineup? Those are some of the questions we plan to answer in today’s article. First let’s take a look at what changes ATI has integrated into the 5700’s architecture.

Specifications

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While rumors suggested that the Radeon 5700’s “Juniper” graphics core could support as many as 1120 stream processors and a 192-bit memory interface, unfortunately those rumors were untrue. Instead what ATI has essentially done is much simpler than that: take a Radeon 5870, slice it in half, and you’ve got a Radeon 5770. Take a 5850, slice it in half, and you’ve got a Radeon 5750.

As a result, the 5770 is equipped with 800 stream processors and 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface, while the 5750 gets by with 720 stream processors and also utilizes a 128-bit GDDR5 memory interface:

Radeon 5800 vs 5700 Series Comparison
	ATI Radeon 5750	ATI Radeon 5770	ATI Radeon 5850	ATI Radeon 5870
Manufacturing Process	40-nm	40-nm	40-nm	40-nm
# of Transistors	1.04 billion	1.04 billion	2.15 billion	2.15 billion
Die Size	166mm2	166mm2	334 mm2	334 mm2
# of Stream Processors	720	800	1440	1600
# of Texture Units	36	40	72	80
# of ROPs	16	16	32	32
Memory Type	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Interface	128-bit	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Max Board Power	86W	108W	151W	188W
Idle Board Power	16W	18W	27W	27W

Those of you who were hoping for more shaders and a wider memory interface are likely going to be pretty disappointed by this at first, but thanks to high clock speeds, the 5700 series cards are still able to deliver more shading and texturing horsepower than ATI’s primary performance GPUs from last year, the Radeon 4850 and 4870:

Radeon 5700 vs Radeon 4800 Comparison
	Radeon 4770	Radeon 4850	Radeon 4870	Radeon 5750	Radeon 5770
Manufacturing Process	40-nm	55-nm	55-nm	40-nm	40-nm
# of Transistors	826 million	956 million	956 million	1.04 billion	1.04 billion
Core Clock Speed	750MHz	625MHz	750MHz	700MHz	850MHz
# of Stream Processors	640	800	800	720	800
Compute Performance	960 GFLOPS	1.0 TFLOPS	1.2 TFLOPS	1.008 TFLOPS	1.36 TFLOPS
Texture Units	32	40	40	36	40
Texture Fillrate	24 GTexels/sec	25 GTexels/sec	30 GTexels/sec	25.2 GTexels/sec	34 GTexels/sec
ROPs	16	16	16	16	16
Pixel Fillrate	12 GPixels/sec	10 GPixels/sec	12 GPixels/sec	11.2 GPixels/sec	13.6GPixels/sec
Z Fillrate	48 GSamples/sec	40 GSamples/sec	48 GSamples/sec	44.8 GSamples/sec	54.4 GSamples/sec
Memory Clock Interface/Type	128-bit GDDR5	256-bit GDDR3	256-bit GDDR5	128-bit GDDR5	128-bit GDDR5
Memory Clock Speed	800MHz (3.2Gbps data rate)	1000MHz (2.0Gbps data rate)	900MHz (3.6Gbps data rate)	1150MHz (4.6Gbps data rate)	1200MHz 4.8Gbps data rate)
Memory Bandwidth	51.2GB/sec	64GB/sec	115.2 GB/sec	73.6GB/sec	76.8GB/sec
Max Board Power	80W	110W	160W	86W	108W

As you can see in the chart above, ATI uses the same basic structure as RV770, with 10 SIMD cores for the 5770 and one texture unit per SIMD core. ATI disables one SIMD core for the Radeon 5750, leaving 720 active stream processors and 36 texture units.

Thanks to their high clock speeds, Radeon 5750 and 5770 compare well against the 4850 and 4870 in many aspects; the Radeon 5750 clearly outclasses the Radeon 4850 while also needing less power. The Radeon 5770 only falls short to the 4870 in memory bandwidth, where it’s limited to 76.8GB/sec of peak bandwidth versus the 4870’s 115.2GB/sec. That’s a difference of exactly 1.5X more bandwidth in favor of the Radeon 4870.

As such, the Radeon 5770 isn’t going to be able to keep up with the Radeon 4870 under any moderate or high resolutions, especially if you crank up the AA, but ATI’s banking on the 5770’s DX11 feature set to make up the difference.

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Board analysis

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Cooling

We’re huge fans of the new ducted cooling design ATI has employed on the Radeon 5870 and 5850, so we’re glad to see it’s also being implemented on the 5770. Dubbed “Phoenix” internally by ATI engineers, these ducted coolers do an excellent job of pulling heat off the GPU while thanks to a new fan, they also generate very little noise during use -- even when the board is OC’ed or multiple cards are paired together for CrossFire.

For the 5870, ATI uses a massive heatsink/fan unit with four copper heatpipes for the card’s cooling. By using such a large cooler, ATI’s able to draw a greater amount of heat off the chip quickly, with the obvious downside being you need a larger case to keep everything cool. With the 5850’s reduced clock speeds and shaders ATI was able to accomplish the same task with a shorter cooler and just two heatpipes. This also helps to keep the price of the board down.

With the 5770 sporting just 800 shaders, an even smaller cooler can be used, and heatpipes are no longer needed to keep the board cool either (which again, helps to reduce the board’s production cost). ATI simply uses an aluminum heatsink with copper baseplate to cool the 5770 GPU. A black plastic duct is then used to channel hot air from the card out the back of the case, as well as other portions of the card.

It’s a pretty effective system, we observed idle temps of 47 degrees Celsius. At load, temps topped out at 72 degrees.

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Eyefinity

ATI’s multi-display Eyefinity technology is fully supported by both Radeon 5700 GPUs. Both cards can drive up to three displays.

Now obviously with just a 128-bit memory interface, these cards won’t be able to drive three 30” displays at 7680x1600, but ATI says that gaming with three 1280x1024 displays (3840x1024) is feasible. With dual display really gaining in popularity in recent years, it isn’t completely unreasonable to believe that a slice of gamers in the mainstream segment would be able to take advantage of Eyefinity.

Retail boards, price and availability

Officially two Radeon 5750 SKUs will be offered on launch day: a 512MB board which will sell for $109, and a 1GB board which will be priced at an MSRP of $129. Both cards will ship at the same clock speeds, with the only difference being the frame buffer size. Obviously gamers stuck with 1600x1200 or lower displays will want to opt for the 512MB board, while gamers who would like to run resolutions of 1080p with AA will want to pick up the 1GB card.

For the Radeon 5770, one SKU will be offered: a 1GB board which will sell for $159.

We’ve been told that “tens of thousands” of boards have been shipped to retailers, and based on what we can tell from asking the board partners, this launch will be the complete opposite of the 5870 and 5850 launches: there are lots of boards in the retail channel this time around, so you shouldn’t have any problems picking up a board today. We were also told that the mixture of 5750s to 5770s is about 50:50 initially; we wouldn’t be surprised if this ratio eventually tilted in favor of the 5750. Right now though ATI’s trying to cash in on the higher margin 5770 parts.

Already we’ve received retail boards from ASUS and PowerColor. Both cards are 100% reference designs, and based on past history, we have a feeling that the PowerColor board will be priced a little lower than the ASUS card, which tends to sell for a premium in comparison to other manufacturers.

Of course, by opting for the ASUS card you’ll get ASUS’ Voltage Tweak software, which allows you to adjust the GPU and memory voltage to increase your OC’ing potential. Another neat feature we noticed on the ASUS 5770 Voltage Tweak is higher clock speed limits within Overdrive. The standard max speeds in Overdrive for the Radeon 5770 are 960MHz core/1445MHz memory. However with the ASUS Voltage Tweak, you can crank the graphics core slider up to 1200MHz using Overdrive. Nice!!

Like the 5850 and 5870, ATI board partners will have the option of including DiRT 2 with the Radeon 5700 series cards.

System Setup

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3D Performance Testbed

Intel Core i7-920 OC’ed to 3.33GHz

Gigabyte GA-EX58 Extreme
6GB (2x3GB) OCZ Reaper HPC 1600 @ DDR-1066 Speeds

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260-216
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 1GB
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
ForceWare 191.07

ATI Radeon HD 5770
ATI Radeon HD 5750
ATI Radeon HD 5850 1GB
Catalyst 9.10 beta (8.66)

ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Catalyst 9.9

300GB Western Digital Caviar SE

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Power Consumption Testbed

Intel Core i5-750
Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6
4GB (2x2GB) Kingston KHX1600C8D3K2/4GX @ DDR3-1333 Speeds
Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Crysis GPU bench used to test load power consumption

Benchmarks

Crysis
Left 4 Dead
Far Cry 2
STALKER: Clear Sky
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Resident Evil 5
BattleForge
Wolfenstein
Tom Clancy’s HAWX

Synthetic 3D Testing

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BattleForge

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BattleForge DirectX 11

Crysis DX10 High Settings

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Crysis – DirectX 10

Crysis w/2xAA

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Crysis – DirectX 10

Far Cry 2

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Far Cry 2 – DirectX 10

STALKER: Clear Sky

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STALKER Clear Sky – DirectX 10

Left 4 Dead

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Left 4 Dead – DirectX9

Resident Evil 5

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Resident Evil – DirectX 10

Batman: Arkham Asylum

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Batman:AA – DirectX 9

Batman: AA w/2xAA

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Batman:AA – DirectX 9

HAWX	Page:: ( 15 / 18 )

HAWX – DirectX 10

Wolfenstein

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Wolfenstein – OpenGL

Power and Overclocking

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Power Consumption

Overclocked Performance

While Overdrive officially tops out at speeds of 960MHz core/1455MHz memory for the Radeon 5770, we used AMD’s GPU Clock Tool to crank the speeds up even further on one of our reference boards. We managed to hit speeds of 982MHz core/1407MHz memory with card #1, while reference card #2 maxed out at 960MHz core/1365MHz memory.

Our PowerColor board was able to OC up to 955MHz core/1370MHz memory, and the ASUS 5770 hit 935MHz core/1380MHz memory. Keep in mind this is bone stock, no adjustments to fan speeds or voltage, so there’s room to go even higher, which we’ll certainly be doing in upcoming retail card reviews.

Conclusion

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Before we can judge the merits of today’s Radeon 5770 and 5750 cards, we first have to take a look at ATI’s holiday lineup for the end of this year. This is the latest info we just obtained hot off the presses from ATI’s sales team:

Radeon 4770: ~$109 (EOL)
Radeon 5750 512: $109
Radeon 4870 512MB: ~$125 (EOL)
Radeon 5750 1GB: $129
Radeon 4870 1GB: ~$149 (EOL)
Radeon 5770 1GB: $159
Radeon 4890 1GB: ~$189 – will phase out in Q4/Q1
Radeon 5850 1GB: $259
Radeon 5870 1GB: $379
Hemlock (5870 X2/5850 X2): $TBD


As you can see, a number of existing ATI Radeon products have now reached end of life (EOL) status. That means ATI’s no longer producing them, so once existing inventory is sold out, they’re gone for good. The Radeon 4850, which isn’t depicted here, sells for about $90 and up and is no longer in production. The same applies for the Radeon 4770 and 4870.

In the case of the Radeon 4850 and 4770, ATI’s 5750 512MB has been designated to replace them, while the 4870 SKUs are being phased out in favor of the 5750 1GB and 5770.

Clearly based on the benchmark results we presented today, the Radeon 5750 has no problems displacing both the 4850 and 4770, and to a lesser extent, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTS 250. Thanks to its 720-shader architecture, high clock speeds, and GDDR5 memory, the Radeon 5750 outruns the ATI cards in most situations, and while the GeForce GTS 250 generally outruns the 5750, when you also factor the 5750’s lower power consumption and feature set (DirectX 11, Eyefinity, HDMI 1.3 etc), it becomes more of a no-brainer: if you’ve got about $110 in your pocket and you’re looking for the best card money can buy, look no further than ATI’s Radeon 5750 512MB.

The 1GB Radeon 5750 board is nice as well, but it won’t offer you any performance improvements with today’s games at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200, which are still common gaming resolutions among users in this price bracket. As a result, its price/performance ratio isn’t as high as the 512MB board for most gamers.

Due to its higher pricing, the Radeon 5770 is in a tougher situation. It isn’t the no-brainer upgrade that the 5750 512MB is. This is because it’s priced to compete with the Radeon 4870 1GB – which is actually a little cheaper – yet it performs slower overall. Ditto for its other competitor, the GeForce GTX 260.

Depending on how often you upgrade your graphics card, the 5770 is either a good buy, or a pass in favor of the GeForce GTX 260 or Radeon 4870.

If you plan to upgrade again in 6-12 months, you’ll probably want to go with a Radeon 4870 1GB or GeForce GTX 260. Thanks to their superior memory bandwidth, these cards perform better than the 5770 in today’s games, which are largely based on DX9 or DX10.

As you saw in our BattleForge benchmarks though, the tables turn in DX11 apps. Here the 5770 is able to leverage DirectX 11 to gain a performance edge over the Radeon 4870, even though the 5770 is giving up significant amount of memory bandwidth to the 4870. Future DX11 titles like Aliens vs Predator and DiRT 2 will be using DX11 even more extensively than BattleForge, so it may be able to pull away even further from the 4870. Therefore if you plan to hold on to your card a little longer, say 2 or 3 years, you’ll definitely be better off in the long run going with Radeon 5770.

When the Juniper GPU was being developed, we doubt ATI’s engineers on the project foresaw that they’d be going up against the 4870 on launch day: ATI’s price cuts over the last 9 months have been unprecedented. Fortunately by arming the card with such high clock speeds, they’ve made it an interesting race with high-end cards from yesteryear like the GTX 260 and 4870. Once DX11 is more prevalent, the 5770 will pull even further away.

Basically the 5770 is a solid card and we think ATI’s done a good job with it given the circumstances. Sure, we’d like to see it at an even $150, but once board partners get rolling with their second generation cards we’re sure it will hit that price point pretty quickly, with factory OC’ed boards pushing it even closer to the 4870.

ATI’s pulled off a pretty impressive feat so far. In less than 30 days, we’ve got DX11 cards spanning price points from $109 to nearly $400. It took months for them to accomplish this last generation. Obviously they’ve left themselves room for a ~$200 Radeon 5830, but we don’t expect that card to appear before the 4890 hits EOL status, which should occur later this quarter or in Q1 of next year. And we’ll see Hemlock hopefully next month establish new levels of performance for the hardcore gaming crowd.

A lot of gamers shopping for a new card for Modern Warfare 2 this Christmas will likely be flocking to ATI’s latest DX11 cards, just as the 8800 GT was the must have upgrade for a lot of gamers for Crysis a few years back. NVIDIA needs to hurry up and offer something, anything, to counter this. Otherwise we anticipate ATI will gain a lot of share in the discrete graphics segment this quarter.