More AMD Radeon 5770 Linux Benchmarks
Earlier this week AMD launched the Radeon HD 5700 series GPUs using their Juniper GPUs as part of the Evergreen family. We published Linux benchmarks of the Radeon HD 5750/5770 on Tuesday with our thoughts on these new mid-range graphics cards, but today there are a few more Ubuntu results to add in for these ATI graphics cards.
The test system remained the same with an Intel Core i7 870 clocked at 2.93GHz with Turbo Boost, an Intel DP55KG Kingsberg motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3 memory, a 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD, and a Samsung SyncMaster 305T LCD. On the software side we were still running Ubuntu 9.10 with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, GNOME 2.28.0, X Server 1.6.3, and fglrx 8.67 / OpenGL 2.1.9115.
For this article we are looking at the Anti-Aliasing / Anisotropic Filtering performance with the Radeon HD 4870 512MB, Radeon HD 5750 1GB, and Radeon HD 5770 1GB graphics cards. In all of the benchmarks we are about to share we used 12x edge-detect AA with 4x AF. Using the Phoronix Test Suite we looked at this AA/AF combination performance on the three graphics cards when running VDrift, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Unigine Tropics, and Lightsmark when running at 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 800, 1280 x 980, 1440 x 900, 1280 x 1024, 1400 x 1050, 1680 x 1050, 1600 x 1200, 1920 x 1080, and 2560 x 1600. Without the Phoronix Test Suite, this certainly would have been a tedious and consuming process, but fortunately it just took PTS running a batch benchmark and then using the analyze-batch commands to generate -- days later with each test at each resolution running multiple times.
With the open-source vDrift game when running with the forced 12x edge-detect anti-aliasing and 4x anisotropic filtering, the game remained playable even at the high 2560 x 1600 resolution. With the 12 resolutions tested, the performance between the Radeon HD 4870 and 5770 were essentially identical the entire time. The Radeon HD 5750 had a slightly slower frame-rate, but even at 2560 x 1600 with 12x AA / 4x AF it had a frame-rate of 59 FPS. The Radeon HD 4870/5770 cards started out at 142 FPS when running at 800 x 600 and ended out at 69 FPS when having a 2560 x 1600 resolution.
The Enemy Territory: Quake Wars results were more mixed. The Radeon HD 4870 graphics card was the fastest when running at 800 x 600, but when at 2560 x 1600 the Radeon HD 5770 wound up on top. When running with a resolution above 1680 x 1050, the Radeon HD 4870 began to fall behind both the Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards. With a frame-rate of around 40 FPS for the Radeon HD 5750/5770 the Juniper graphics cards are just fast enough to be mostly playable when running at 2560 x 1600 with 12x AA / 4x AF.