AMD’s Radeon HD 5770 & 5750: DirectX 11 for the Mainstream Crowd
by Ryan Smith on October 13, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
BattleForge
BattleForge is EA’s card-based online-only RTS. As the first DirectX11 title it’s of particular importance for the latest rendition of DirectX, although in this case we aren’t using any features that would be impacted by it. Even without ambient occlusion, BattleForge manages to be a rather punishing game for GPUs.
BattleForge is another game that punishes the 5700 series. The performance hit coming from the 4870 starts at 25% at 1680, and ends at just 18% at 2560. This also means that the 5770 loses to the GTX 260.
As for the 5750, it loses at 1680 by 7%, but eeks out a very slight win at 1920. Apparently being memory bandwidth starved isn’t so bad when your competitor is too.
Finally, this gives us one of the larger gaps between the 5770 and 5850. $100 buys you 60%-70% more performance.
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Spoelie - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
The difference is obviously the memory bandwidth. It seems to me that ATi should have gone with a 192bit bus, this change alone would have made the HD57x0 a worthy successor to the HD48x0 range, without any performance caveats, while still being significantly cheaper to manufacture (40nm vs 55nm, 192bit vs 256bit).Skiprudder - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
I'm guessing your right, but I'd like to see Anand (or Ryan) do one of the track-down-the-engineers that this site is famous for, and hear the rational on AMD's part.CarrellK - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Anand knows where I live...CarrellK
futrtrubl - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Or even just overclock the memory and see how performance scales. That would provide some evidence for the memory bottleneck theory.plague911 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
At this price point it looks like the 5770 & 5750 are priced to pad AMD's pockets, not to provide increase performance (not that, that's a bad thing when in a war with Intel). With the smaller process size and smaller chip size and similar performance each new part sold will net AMD a substantialy higher profit. This is why AMD will likely kill off the older gen instead of droping the price point.MadMan007 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Yes I think that's where my mild disappointment comes from. Not that they aren't great cards for the launch MSRP, they just aren't great in light of street prices, but unlike HD4800 or even arguably HD5800 AMD doesn't seem interesting in shifting the price/performance curve with these cards. At best matching the current price/performance curve leaves me a bit cold.MonkeyPaw - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
That's been the trend from ATI lately with their mid-grade cards. The 5700 series is meant to offer roughly the same performance of the 4800 series for a cheaper price. The 4600 series last time was meant to match the 3800 series (the 4770 was quite an oddball though). It's not a bad system, really, as it allows ATI to migrate their lineup with some consistency.Lonyo - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
It might be that some of the cost does indeed come from the RAM though.Once GDDR5 chips drop some more, it will be easy for AMD to drop the prices on these cards, but that might (might) be what's limiting pricing options.
Or AMD just want to try and get maximum profit from these cards.
But even so, when GDDR5 prices drop it will be easier to extract profit at lower prices, so GDDR5 pricing will still be at least partly responsible.
geok1ng - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Reading the charts it gets obvious that it is upgrade time: lets get 4850s, 4870s, and even 4850X2-4870X2 on the next weeks before these cards phase out: they are faster and a LOT cheaper than the 57xx series. As for the high end consumers, just wait for the 5870X2, now that is a card to roll eyes, when and IF it launches.codedivine - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
This is relevant only for compute folks like me, but does 57xx support double precision?