AMD Radeon HD 5750/5770

In late September AMD had introduced the Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards as the successors to the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870, respectively. These graphics cards, which are part of the Evergreen GPU family, have been performing quite nicely according to reports, but we have yet to test either of these Cypress graphics cards under Linux. Today though AMD is introducing the first midrange graphics cards in the Evergreen family. Under the Juniper codename, the Radeon HD 5750 and HD 5770 are being launched with both graphics cards being quite similar except for the ATI Radeon HD 5770 shipping with slightly higher core and memory clocks along with a different heatsink. In this review we have the first Linux-based benchmarks of these two new graphics cards, which are also the first publicized Linux benchmarks from any AMD Evergreen graphics processor.

The Radeon HD 5000 series graphics processors introduce support for Microsoft DirectX 11. Of course, to a Linux user this does not mean much, but this is one of the areas being heavily publicized by AMD in their marketing material. The Radeon HD 5000 series though is compatible with OpenGL 3.2. Some of the other features that are shared between the HD 5700 and HD 5800 series are ATI Eyefinity, Stream Technology, OpenCL, TeraScale2, PCI Express 2.1 x16, and UVD2. While AMD has shown a 24-monitor Eyefinity setup on Linux, the support has yet to arrive in their proprietary Catalyst Linux driver. The Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD2) support with ATI Avivo HD may also be ignored by Linux users at this time, as we have been talking about the X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA) for a year now and it still has yet to be usable by ATI Radeon customers, but it finally will be in the very near future. UVD2 in ATI Radeon hardware will finally mean something on Linux, but we will have to wait to share more until permitted. AMD will also be marketing the HD 5770 as a "green" graphics card with only 18 Watts of power being consumed while idling, 108 Watts max power consumption, leading performance/Watt, and the graphics cards only requiring one 6-pin PCI-E power connector.

The Radeon HD 5750 and 5770 are built on a 40nm process like the other Evergreen GPUs and each graphics card has over 1.04 billion transistors. The ATI Radeon HD 5750 has 720 Stream processors, 1GB of GDDR5 memory, a 700MHz engine clock, 1.008 TeraFLOPS processing power, 1.15GHz memory clock, 73.6GB/sec memory bandwidth, a maximum power consumption of 86 Watts and just 16 Watts while idling. The ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card has 800 Stream processors, 1GB of GDDR5 memory, an 850MHz engine clock, 1.36 TeraFLOPS processing power, 1.2GHz memory clock, 76.8GB/sec memory bandwidth, a maximum power consumption of 108 Watts and just 18 Watts while idling. Both the Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 5770 are CrossFireX compatible for use with up to two GPUs. Dual GPU CrossFireX is compatible with the ATI Linux drivers.

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