Final thoughts
18 AMD's cleaver
In an inevitable move of saturating the discrete graphics-card market with 5-series GPUs, AMD has launched the Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 cards, to be etailed, at launch, by a range of partners at £125 and £109, respectively.
AMD's taken top-of-the-range HD 5870/50 architecture and cleanly cleaved it into two, creating mid-range cards that are relatively inexpensive to produce when pitted against the incumbent competition from both its own 4-series Radeon range and, looking across, NVIDIA's GTX/GTS GPUs.
Radeon HD 5770 1,024MB
In the case of the Radeon HD 5770 1,024MB, the straight-down-the-middle chop results in a card that benchmarks below the level of a GeForce GTX 260 896MB or Radeon HD 4870 512MB yet comes in at the same etail price of around £125.
Pulling no punches, we're a touch disappointed that AMD has cut so much off the new '70 card, but such is the nomenclature that it paves the way for an HD 5790, helping bridge the gap between the HD 5770 and HD 5850.
There are a number of compelling reasons as to why AMD/ATI hasn't gone for a better-performing design here, though. Radeon HD 4870/50 will soon disappear off the catalogues, making the '70-to'70 comparison moot, and architecting a mid-range card with such a relatively small die - 180mm²-190mm² - means that the Radeon is, importantly, quids-in when thrown up against big, chunky, expensive-to-fabricate GeForce GTX 260 - its direct competitor.
NVIDIA and its partners cannot afford to keep dropping the price on the expensive GTX GPUs to attract custom: a fact that's well known within AMD.
Yet a modern graphics card is more than just a pusher of fps. Radeon HD 5770 carries all the multimedia qualities of the high-end cards introduced a few weeks' ago, including Eyefinity multi-monitor goodness, bitstream audio, and excellent power-draw credentials. Then there's full DX11 compliance, lest you forget.
Radeon HD 5750 1,024MB
A direct derivation of Radeon HD 5850, the cheaper mid-range card performs a little better than a GeForce GTS 250.
The £109 offering is able to run most games at 1,920x1,200 with decent image quality and, like the HD 5770, offers a better feature-set alongside older-generation-matching performance.
We're concerned that the introductory UK price is too high for a card that's often trounced by the equivalent-costing HD 4870. AMD and its partners really need to push it below £100 if it's to make a whole lot of sense.
The bottom line
The release of these new GPUs shows us that AMD is confident that arch-rival NVIDIA isn't going to raise the mid-range performance bar - be it fps or features - anytime soon. This is why Radeon HD 5770/50 don't beat older cards which now come in at the same (or lower) price point. Truth is, they don't have to, and that's a little worrying for the consumer.
Focussing on features more than performance, the Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 are solid cards with most of the bases covered. We find it difficult to recommend them to anyone who already owns a Radeon 48x0 or GeForce GTX GPU, but, on balance, there is intrisic merit in both, especially as prices begin to settle down. Users with older graphics cards should, we believe, look at AMD's ATI Radeon 5000-series in preference to last year's price-reduced technology, though.
Stay tuned as we continue the week with looks at HD 5770 and HD 5750 CrossFireX.
