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
Crysis: Warhead
Kicking things off, we’ll start with Crysis: Warhead. Warhead is still the single most demanding game in our arsenal, with cards continuing to struggle to put out a playable frame rate with everything turned up.
Update: As a few of you pointed out, there was something a bit off with our Crysis results; we had a Radeon 4850 beating the 5770. As it turns out we wrote down the maximum framerate for the 4850 instead of the average framerate. None of the other results were affected, and this has been corrected. Sorry, folks.
There are a few different situations we’re going to be interested in. The first is the matchup between the 5770, the 4870, and the GTX 260. The second is the matchup between the 5750, the 4850, and the GTS 250. The third is the 5770 as compared to the 5800 series, in order to see what another $100 or $200 is buying you in the Evergreen family.
Unfortunate for the 5770, this is not a game that treats it well. In spite of the clock speed advantage over the 4870, and the architectural advantages (extra caches and what-not), it underperforms the 4870 by about 15% here. AMD had once told us that they believed that they weren’t memory bandwidth constrained on the 4870/4890, but when that’s the only significant difference between the 5770 and the 4870 that would explain the performance difference (certainly Juniper wouldn’t be slower than RV770), we are beginning to doubt that. Meanwhile the GTX 260 outscores the 5770 here too.
Looking at the 5770 compared to the 5850, $100 buys you roughly 50% more performance.
The 5750 fares much better here. It beats the 4850 by 10%-20%, and beats the GTS 250 by a similar margin.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
117 Comments
View All Comments
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
I don't like to make a habit of disagreeing with Ryan, but unfortunately only Cypress based cards support double precision. The 57xx series does *not* support double precision.Take care,
Anand
MadMan007 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
So where is the double precision implemented? I didn't bother too look it up by I imagine it's buried deep in the shaders. If so why take it out? Is it just disabled or not present at all? If not present I guess I could see removal for the sake of fewer transistors but otherwise it seems like artificial market segmentation. On the other hand hardcore compute power people where time = $$ won't have a problem getting a 5850 or better, or seeing what NV does.CarrellK - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
DPFP (Double Precision Floating Point) is physically not in the Juniper GPU - it is not artificial segmentation. We had to choose between giving you a GPU that would be great for consumer HPC and games at a price you could afford, or something that cost notably more.There are virtually zero consumer applications that need DPFP.
CarrellK
stmok - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
According to ATI's Stream SDK v1.4 page...Desktop cards that support double precision: Radeon HD 3690, 3830, 3850, 3870, 3870 X2, 4770, 4830, 4850, 4850 X2, 4870, 4870 X2, 4890.
Mobile GPUs that support double precision: Mobiliy Radeon 3850
3870, 4850, 4850X2, 4870
None of their IGPs support it.
Their newer Stream SDK 2.0 series (currently in Beta 4), mentions they now support OpenCL in GPU, and that the Radeon HD 5870, 5850, 5770, and 5750 are supported. No mentioned of which can actually do double precision though...
Still, considering the 5770 looks similar in spec to the 4870/4850, it may support it. (The major difference seems to be the Memory Bus Width.)
Come to think of it, what are the requirements to support double precision on a Radeon HD-series GPU?
codedivine - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Thats sad :( .. thanks for the info!Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
My understanding is that it's available in the entire Evergreen lineup. So I'm going to give you a tentative "yes".codedivine - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Thanks!endlesszeal - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
As always from anandtech, great review. However, I almost crapped my pants when I saw the price of a "display port to dvi" dongle," $100?? Hope thats not the average not inflated by Apple price. =)Zingam - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
You don't really need that dongle anyway.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Actually, the Apple adapter is still the only active adapter I'm aware of that's widely available. So yes, that $100 is because of the Apple price.