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
Far Cry 2
Far Cry 2 is another foliage-heavy game. Thankfully it’s not nearly as punishing as Crysis, and it’s possible to achieve a good framerate even with all the settings at their highest.
Update: When we first published this article, we had some anomalously high results for the 5770 at 1680 and 1920. We have found the reason for this and corrected it. This brings the 5770's scores down by 10fps or so.
Compared to Crysis: Warhead, Far Cry 2 paints a better picture for the 5770. Here it just manages to beat out our 4870, which may be slightly disappointing for those of you that are expecting a decisive victory over the 4870, but it's better than a loss like in Crysis. The GTX 260 is also neck-and-neck with our two Radeon cards here.
Far Cry 2 also paints an interesting case for the 5750 in comparison to the 4850. Far Cry 2 likes RAM, particularly on AMD cards. With the 1GB on our 5750, it doubles the terrible performance of the 4850. This is going to be the exception to the norm here though.
Finally, with the solid performance of the 5770, a 5850 buys around 40% performance improvement here.
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Mint - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
The 4870 will only drop in price to clear inventory, because it's not worth it to produce them with the intent of selling them at $120 or less. I expect them to sell out before the price drops much further.Don't fret, though. The 5770 has a 128-bit bus and a fairly small die. It will drop in price soon enough, unless NVidia decides to stop bleeding $$ on its huge GT200 chips on $150 cards and Fermi-based mainstream cards can't get down in price.
samspqr - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
well, my favorite retailer (alternate.de) already has the 5750 and 5770 in stock, at 130eur and 160eur respectivelythey also have the 4870-1GB at 115eur, which is MUCH cheaper
in any case, right now, with my usage pattern (24/7 on, but mostly GPU-idle, maybe just one hour a day of GPU stress), the difference in power consumption between the 4870 and the 5770 is at least 50w, which means ((50*24*365)/1000)*0.15eur/KWh = 65.7eur/year
so it pays for the difference in just over 6 months, at the expense of slightly lower performance, with the advantage of less noise
speaking of which, I like my GPUs silent, passive if possible, thankyouverymuch, so I'll wait for vendor-specific designs or after-market coolers; by the time these are out, maybe the 4870 will not eve be available anymore
samspqr - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
(sorry, that was 8 months, don't know how I got that 6 the first time)7Enigma - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Search for and download GPUTool. It's still in beta and has some quirks but for massive idle power drop it cannot be beat (at least for my system, 4870). I simply lowered the 2D core/memory clocks (they have a low/medium/high setting, and ALL need to be the same setting or you get flickering), down to around 250MHz, and this dropped idle power consumption by a crazy amount (40-80w, can't remember exactly). Once the creator of the program releases a newer version I'm hoping some of the fan speed and voltage mod bugs get worked out. Even so, the 2 second click to lower idle speeds is incredibly handy.HTH
chrnochime - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
I don't know if you've tried using ATI tray tool already, but after scourging around the web trying to figure out way to keep my XFX 4870 1GB from drawing more power than needed(e.g. when just surfing/playing video), I was able to drop the GPU clock to 400 MHz, and memory to 225 MHz. The memory draws much more power than does the GPU, so leaving GPU at 400 doesn't really make that much of a difference, compared to 250.Keep in mind that running said program in Vista is somewhat of a headache, since the driver is not signed by MS, so you need to do the work-around to get it running as startup program so the clocks drop can be initiated by the program.
makechen - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link
48566565rdh - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
A year later, the 5770 is *cheaper* than the 4850/4870. I just purchased one for $99 from the egg. It consumes 30% less power at idle and at load than the 48xx cards.I suppose at the $160 price point, it was fine to slam this card. At the current price point, though, it is the BEST price-for-performance and performance-per-watt card out there.