AMD’s Radeon HD 5570: Low Profile, Higher Performance
by Ryan Smith on February 9, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Conclusion
With AMD's positioning of the Radeon HD 5570 in the marketplace, you can get a few very different outcomes depending on what you’re looking for. As a video-only HTPC card, it’s no better than the 5450 in features, while it’s worse in terms of power consumption and noise. Based on our research the 5570 isn’t the HTPC über card we were expecting it to be, so if you can bear the limitations of the 5450, that’s going to be the better card. Otherwise the 5670 is the most capable choice out there. The 5570 does nothing better than either of those two cards when it comes to HTPC use.
Meanwhile if we take a look at overall performance, the 5570 doesn’t fare much better. The move from GDDR5 to DDR3 has a significant impact on the performance of the Redwood GPU in most cases, bringing the 5570 well below the 5670 and similar cards. The lower-end of the 5000 series has been consistently overpriced when it comes to overall performance, and the 5570 is no different. The GDDR3 9600GT can be found for around the same price point, and is anywhere between just as fast as the 5570 to completely clobbering it. The 5570 can’t compete amidst that much of a memory bandwidth gap. If you can fit a full-sized card, you can do much better than the 5570 when it comes solely to performance; the 9600GT and the GT 240 are both much more capable cards for the $80-$85 price tag.
Last, but certainly not least however, is the area the 5570 excels at: low-profile cards. The low-profile market is basically dominated by bottom-tier cards such as the GeForce 210, Radeon 4350, Radeon 5450, and of course a number of even older cards. The 5570 is faster than every single one of them, usually by a factor of 2-3x. Compared to the 5450 in particular, it fits in the same form factor and offers around 3x the performance for only $25 more. The use of Redwood as opposed to Cedar does mean it consumes more power and generates more heat, but this should be a bearable tradeoff for the significant performance improvement in most low-profile cases.
The only catch we would add to that is that while the 5570 is going to be the fastest mass-market card, technically speaking it’s not the fastest low-profile card ever made. We’ve seen a low-profile 9800GT from Sparkle that should make quick work of the 5570, but at 2x the power draw of the 5570, it’s a specialty card that would only work in a limited number of well ventilated low-profile cases. The 5570 in comparison is going to be the fastest low-profile card on mass-market.
With that out of the way however, there’s not a whole lot else we can say. By being a low-profile card the 5570 is a more compelling second-tier card to the 5670 than the 4650 was to the 4670, but otherwise it brings with it all the pitfalls of trying to shave down the price of an already decently cheap card. Unless you need a low-profile card or a card that specifically meets the 5570’s power characteristics, you’re going to be better off looking at other cards, particularly if you can swing a little more money for something like the Radeon 4850 while it’s still available.
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andy o - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
I think you mean "when ESVP is enabled" here:"it looks like AMD is hardcoding their drivers to disable certain post-processing features when ESVP is disabled"
andy o - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
Ryan, I don't think this is such a big deal:"In our testing we didn’t notice any obvious playback issues with the 5450 or 5570 when we had ESVP disabled, but we’ve seen enough forum posts of this feature magically fixing poor video playback performance that we’re not confident enough to recommend disabling this feature. It’s something we think should be left enabled, at least for the time being."
I don't think there's any "magically fixing" for those people was probably done because of ESVP disabling post-processing features and nothing esoteric, so I think it's safe to assume that this aggressive disabling of feature by ESVP on these drivers is a bug, and you can safely disable it, and just enable some post-processing options you want, as long as you don't get choppy video or have issues with A/V sync.
I don't see how ESVP could affect smooth video playback more than what was explained by AMD (seems the forum user I mentioned on the 5450 thread was right about what it does). Once you have all the video frames showing in sync (no dropped frames), there's nothing more to make the video smoother besides using more post-processing to interpolate video and show it at higher refresh rates (which is clearly not happening here, and it would require a 120 Hz monitor at least.
juhatus - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
Remember that AA absolutly kills this card? So whats the point showing it on the big table-results.How would it compare to other sub-100 cards without AA?
knowom - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
Most cards bottleneck more with AA turned on and people tend to prefer having AA turned on as opposed to off when possible.juhatus - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
3870 uses its shaders to do the AA, hence the bad AA results.16ROPS 256bit memory and ~400shaders shouln't compare too badly to this card without AA.
OCedHrt - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
Per your numbers, the 5670 is 15W, not 25W, more under load.jigglywiggly - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
This card is fail.Pino - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
It´s perfect for me.I just play Day of Defeat Source and TF2, and I have a Dell Vostro 200 a low profile chassis, with a limited 200W PSU.
knowom - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
Pretty much the GT 240 basically wipes the floor with it in terms of performance, power, and noise. I don't see any real selling points on this card even DX11 and Eyefinity don't seem too viable on such a castrated card performance wise.Get the GT240 instead or spend the extra $10-$20's on a better performance card or save yourself a $10-$15's on the quieter and more energy efficient one is what it boils down to.
mczak - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - link
I think that's a bit harsh, though really the review was harsh I think in fact it was a bit unfair.- the lower power draw of the gt240 has no connection to reality. All other reviews (some of them measuring power draw directly, some at the wall) show the hd5570 has a quite a bit lower power draw than the gt240 ddr3 under load (at idle it's a wash), not to mention the gt240 gddr5 (or HD4670) which are even a bit higher. I strongly suspect either something was wrong with the sample card or measurement error (or rather, not keeping the setup consistent).
- the RE5 numbers are very puzzling, and I'd say they are just bogus. Toms also tested this game, and the HD5570 just behaved like in any other title (that is, close to HD4670) there. Seems a lot more believable.
- the comparison to gt240 gddr5 seems a tad unfair. Now AMD thinks this should be compared to gt220 which isn't really useful, but it seems to me that price-wise it will be really the same as the gt240 ddr3, not gddr5 version. Granted, that's probably only a 10 dollar difference but when talking about 80$ cards this does make a difference.