ATI Radeon HD 5770: It’s going to be tough to knock down Juniper

Posted by Robert Dow and Jon Peddie on October 13th 2009 | Comments Closed |
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: gpu ati aib amd radeon gpgpu pmark 3dmark hd5770

When ATI took us aboard an aircraft carrier in Alameda California a couple of weeks ago to introduce their new Radeon HD5870 code named Cypress, they also showed us their plan for releasing a scaled down version of the new chip code named Juniper.

Phase two of their “Sweet spot” program, and on schedule, ATI delivered (literally) their Midrange AIBs the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750.

Code named Juniper, the 5770 is an incredible value delivering DirectX 11 performance, with a GB of GDDR5 memory and doing it for a few dollars and a few watts.

The new midrange AIBs also support three displays in ATI’s Eyefinty mode. There are four connectors on the back plate just like the 5870: 2-DVI dual-link, an HDMI, and a DisplayPort (DP). The DP can be used with an external DP to DVI connector to drive three displays if you don’t have a DP compatible monitor (which we don’t yet). Also there is only one six-pin power connector required for the new AIB.

The comparison of the two new midrange AIBs to their big brother the 5870 is shown in Table 1. (The ATI Radeon HD 5870 was reviewed in the September 29, 2009 - Volume 9, Number 20 issue of TechWatch, page 44. Buy your copy today.)

Table 1 : Comparison of specifications of ATI’s midrange and performance segment AIBs
  HD 5750 HD 5770 HD 5870
Process 40nm 40nm 40nm
Transistors 1.04B 1.04B 2.15B
Engine Clock 700 MHz 850 MHz 850 MHz
Stream Processors 720 800 1,600
Compute Performance 1.008 TFLOPS 1.36 TFLOPS 2.7 TFLOPS
Texture Units 36 40 80
Texture Fillrate 25.2 GTexels/s 34.0 GTexel/s 68.0 GT/s
ROPs 16 16 32
Pixel Fillrate 11.2 Gpixel/s 13.6 GPixel/s 27.2 Gpixel/s
Z/Stencil 44.8 GSamples/s 54.4 GSamples/s 108.8 GSamples/s
Memory Type GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5
Memory Clock 1150 MHz 1200 MHz 1200 MHz
Memory Data Rate 4.6 Gbps 4.8 Gbps 5 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth 73.6 GB/s 76.8 GB/s 153 GB/s
Maximum Board Power 86W 108W 188 W
Menory on board 512MB – 1GB 1 GB 1 GB
Idle Board Power 16W 18W 27 W
Price $109 - $129 $159 $380

The HD5770 is physically smaller, with a smaller and quieter fan.

Figure 1: Comparison of ATI's HD5770 to the HD5870

Pmark

Figure 2: Pmark comparison of ATI HD5770 to various other AIBs (Higher is better)

And how did they do? They did really well. We compared them to several AIBs, single and dual, and the results are shown in the following charts.

The Pmark score shows the new ATI Radeon HD 5770 AIB to be the hands down best board available today.

The Pmark is a three parameter test

The PMark

Where:

  • Performance is expressed in 3DMark Pre-set Extreme Vantage score
  • Price is expressed in US dollars (NextTag data used)
  • Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

When Performance is expressed in FPS then the FPS score is multiplied by 100 to put it in the same range as the 3D Vantage scores.

The data

Figure 3: Futuremark Vantage tests of various AIBS at various settings

Figure 4: Unigine Topics, 1920 x 1200 resolution, Reflections ON, Shaders high

Figure 5: Resident Evil 5 benchmark setting high

We tested seven AIBs on three benchmarks at various resolutions and filtering for a total of 16 tests per AIB. The results of that testing is shown in the following three charts.

Notice the regularity of the AIBs to each other for the Vantage tests – until you get to the extreme loading and highest resolution.

Then notice how uneven the results are from AIB to AIB at different settings in the Unigine benchmark, more realistic.

The in-game Resident Evil 5 also shows a mixed set of results.

This points out the danger in using just one benchmark to draw conclusions.

All the tests were run on a Nehalem Bloomfield Core i7 CPU W3570 @ 3.20GHz with 4 GB RAM and a SSD.

What do we think?

We hear lots of talk about consoles vs. PC for gaming. One of the arguments is you can buy for a few hundred dollars a (three to four year old) console and a PC costs a thousand dollars. The ATI Radeon HD5770 shoots that stupid argument right in the head. You could buy an entry level PC for $300 and an ATI AIB for $100 to $150 and have gaming machine that could drive multiple displays and be at least be 2X more powerful than a console, and let you do other things with it beside just play games.

The new ATI Radeon HD5770 is a very good midrange AIB. Although it scored the lowest performance in 62.5% of the tests we ran, it was being run against high-end performance and enthusiast grade AIBs, which cost twice as much or more than the HD5770. When run in CrossFire mode the pair did better and still offered a completive price. However, when compared to Nvidia’s GTX260 core 216 it showed very well and especially in the high demand tests with max AA and filters on.

In terms sheer performance the ATI Radeon HD5870 in CrossFire mode is the clear winner in all tests. Second place however varies depending upon the test and the Nvidia GTX 295 makes a very respectable showing in 62.5% of all the tests.

However, in over system and value considerations using the Pmark, the ATI Radeon HD5770 is a clear winner (Figure 2) A 1.36 TFLOPS AIB with a GB of GDDR5 memory that can drive three monitors for $159 is a compelling story. If ATI can get this message out to the consumers the company should have a very successful product for the coming holidays.

Next year two more derivatives will show up for the low end portion of the midrange code named Redwood and cedar.

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