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.
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squeezee - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Remember that there is more to the card than just the ROP/TU/ALUs. If the other logic is intact it could give the dual 5770s a net larger ammount of cache, more resources for scheduling, rasterization, etc.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Exactly. Geometry is also a big thing; the 5800 series and 5700 series have the same geometry abilities. Unfortunately this isn't something we can really test in a meaningful manner.Torres9 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
"The 5770 is 108W at load and 18W at idle, meanwhile the 5850 is 86W at load and 16W at idle."do u mean the 5750 or is the 5850 that good?
ET - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
I'm again seeing many comments of "DX11 gives me nothing". Well, you buying it gives developers one more reason to develop for it. If you stick to DX10, then it'd take more time to move to DX11. Really. Until the majority of the market moves to a new feature set (and hopefully Windows 7 will help move out of DX9), developers will only use higher end features as "special features".MadMan007 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
1 word for real DX11 rollout: consoles.ET - Thursday, October 15, 2009 - link
You're right, though not the way you think. Xbox programming is more like DX11 than DX9 or DX10, and the Xbox also has a tesselation unit (though simpler than in the DX11 parts), so moving to DX11 would make developers life easier.What users don't get is the difference between API and hardware capabilities. Even if developers limit themselves to DX9 level capabilities, for console compatibility, using DX10 or DX11 only to develop will be much easier than using both DX9 and DX10, and result in faster and less buggy code (optimising for two very different API's is hard).
xipo - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
As MadMan007 says, there wont be a large adoption rate from the developers towards DX11 until the NEXT generation of consoles ships (around 2012) supporting DX11... Win7 won't matter because game developers are still going to make games for DX9-DX11... Probably the very few game that will come out being DX11 only are going to be some kind of tech demos & suck 4ss!ET - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
I haven't seen it stated, but I'd like to know if the 4850 benchmarked is 512MB or 1GB. If it's 512MB then the comparison with the 5750 isn't valid.poohbear - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
u never mentioned that the performance of the 5770 might be a driver issue? the hardware is certainly capable of outdoing the 4870 as we can see in Farcry2, so maybe its just a driver issue?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
I don't believe it's a driver issue. If anything it's a Far Cry 2-specific issue, but that's something I'm going to have to do some more digging for.