AMD’s Radeon HD 5770 & 5750: DirectX 11 for the Mainstream Crowd

@ 2009/10/13
When we were looking at the Radeon HD 5800 series cards, writing a conclusion was rather easy for us. We didn’t need to talk about intangibles like Eyefinity or DirectX 11, because the 5800 series brought better performance at better prices for existing games. This made recommending the 5800 series a straightforward thing to do.

But we don’t have that luxury with the Radeon HD 5700 series. The value of the 5770 in particular is clearly not going to be in its performance. Compared to AMD’s 4870, it loses well more than it wins, and if we throw out Far Cry 2, it’s around 10% slower overall. It also spends most of its time losing to NVIDIA’s GTX 260, which unfortunately the 4870 didn’t have so much trouble with. AMD clearly has put themselves in to a hole with memory bandwidth, and the 5770 doesn’t have enough of it to reach the performance it needs to be at.

If you value solely performance in today’s games, we can’t recommend the 5770. Either the 4870 1GB or the GTX 260 would be the better buy.

Comment from Kougar @ 2009/10/14
1920x1200 4xAA looks fine to me.
Comment from jmke @ 2009/10/13
What's got into their heads using 4xAA in Crysis Warhead with VHQ on mid-range products...