Radeon HD 5770

[Panix]

I have been reading about this particular card and I'm intereste in it as a potential video card upgrade. I like that it is lower power consumption and I assume low heat as well.

It would be nicer with higher level performance but should be sufficient for what I need. Also, the price is cheaper than the other newer ATI cards.

I was wondering what this card is capable of and what is supported so far. Can I at least play movies with it without tearing if the other features aren't supported yet? I could wait and boot into Windows to play games if I did play games. What's the current update (i.e. status) with it?

Thanks for any answers.

[rohcQaH]

"low power consumption" is relative. The 46xx have a low power consumption and should be powerful enough for movies, compositing and older games. 5770 is only needed if you're either into 3d modeling/rendering or simply into recent games.

To avoid tearing, you'd have to display the movie using openGL. xv will tear. I've had a bit of gfx corruption when switching to fullscreen with ogl, so I still use xv. (as a multiscreen-user, my movies will tear anyway.)
You could try xvba, if you can get it working. I didn't bother.


Games on windows are just beautiful with the card and a high-res monitor The 5770 is more powerful than anything in current-gen consoles (360/ps3/wii), so anything working on those consoles should run great. (unless the game was ported by a bunch of typewriter-monkeys, but let's not talk about GTA IV here)

Games on Wine, see above. It all depends on the games, some work great, some work with minor flaws, some suffer heavy performance penalties and some don't work at all. http://appdb.winehq.org is your friend.


I've had a few stability problems with fglrx. Not more often than previously with the nvidia drivers, but more severe: nvidia just killed the X server, fglrx hangs the whole system (thus taking a minute longer to recover). Annoying, but I only regard fglrx as a necessary evil until OS support arrives, anyway.

[Kano]

So you expect 6/5 -> 20% more opencl speed compared to nvidia? Prove that...

[Kano]

You can always put any number in there. Prove it!!!!

[Hoodlum]

It's a very nice card. The free drivers aren't ready yet though. Only really a huge concern if you're a fedora user or for philosophical reasons.

[Kano]

The binary drivers are not ready for fedora too.

[Hoodlum]

Yeah that was what I was implying. Unfortunately for me, I am. This is one instance I prefer to support the company for philosophical reasons ( I want free drivers, this binary BS can go to hell) over short term practicality. That and I didn't really have a choice unless I wanted to buy outdated hardware (no competition atm) or wait (not an option).

[Panix]

"low power consumption" is relative. The 46xx have a low power consumption and should be powerful enough for movies, compositing and older games. 5770 is only needed if you're either into 3d modeling/rendering or simply into recent games.

To avoid tearing, you'd have to display the movie using openGL. xv will tear. I've had a bit of gfx corruption when switching to fullscreen with ogl, so I still use xv. (as a multiscreen-user, my movies will tear anyway.)
You could try xvba, if you can get it working. I didn't bother.


Games on windows are just beautiful with the card and a high-res monitor The 5770 is more powerful than anything in current-gen consoles (360/ps3/wii), so anything working on those consoles should run great. (unless the game was ported by a bunch of typewriter-monkeys, but let's not talk about GTA IV here)

Games on Wine, see above. It all depends on the games, some work great, some work with minor flaws, some suffer heavy performance penalties and some don't work at all. http://appdb.winehq.org is your friend.


I've had a few stability problems with fglrx. Not more often than previously with the nvidia drivers, but more severe: nvidia just killed the X server, fglrx hangs the whole system (thus taking a minute longer to recover). Annoying, but I only regard fglrx as a necessary evil until OS support arrives, anyway.

So, this card, Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4650 600Mhz Core 1GB. would be good if mostly into movies, videos and 3D? It's $80.

I guess I need to look it up to see how it compares.

I was curious about the issues because I am familiar with Nvidia driver installs. I can recover from black screens and 'repair' the driver settings. In other words, I'm somewhat comfortable with the issues as I think I can recover from them. I only have experience with older Radeon cards.

If I use full screen with an ATI card, I'll have graphics corruption? I like to watch movies in full screen (at least, sometimes) so what would that mean? Maybe it's better to get the cheaper ATI card for now?

I was comparing the Radeon HD 5770 and the GTS 250 (I would also consider the newer GT220M Nvidia cards) for as high end as I would go.

Thanks for all these replies for all who answered! Some good and interesting info continuing in this thread!

[monraaf]

So, this card, Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4650 600Mhz Core 1GB. would be good if mostly into movies, videos and 3D? It's $80.

Or you can wait for the 5670, supposedly it will be launched this month. But then again it will probably be only a little bit cheaper than the 5750, and the 5750 has almost twice as much shader processors.

I'm personally thinking about purchasing a 5750 myself, but IMHO fglrx is really not a viable option for video playback.

[rohcQaH]

So, this card, Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4650 600Mhz Core 1GB. would be good if mostly into movies, videos and 3D? It's $80.

should be cheaper than $80.. not sure if it's actually an "upgrade" to your current card, or why you actually want to upgrade. Care to provide more info?
The 5770 is more powerful than the 4670, about 2.5 the power at 2 times the power consumption.
IIRC the 4670 is slightly more powerful than the GT220 (but I'm sure Kano will correct me if I'm wrong ), while the 5770 blows any nvidia single-GPU card that doesn't need it's own power plant.

It all boils down to two questions:
- how much performance do you need, i.e. what do you want to do with it?
- would you prefer fglrx or the OS drivers?

The 4670 is already supported by the OS drivers which would give you tearfree video and fast 2D, but still lacks some openGL extensions. Prepare to install GIT versions to get the latest code.
There's also the 4770, which is about middle ground between 4670 and 5770, but it's already supported by the OS drivers. This one would have been my choice if I didn't need the third output of my 5770 (Eyefinity).

If I use full screen with an ATI card, I'll have graphics corruption?

I don't know what you'll have. *I* have corruption when I press f in mplayer. If I just turn mplayer into a maximized, borderless window, it works. Fullscreen games work fine, too. Not sure what went wrong, but as I'm happy with xv I didn't bother to investigate.