AMD Radeon HD 5750/5770

We have only had our hands on these new ATI Radeon HD 5700 series "Juniper" graphics cards for three days, but so far, we are enjoying them and becoming quite fond of these new AMD GPUs. The Radeon HD 5750 performance is comparable to that of the Radeon HD 4850, but at a lower cost and with a greater set of features. The Radeon HD 5750 has a suggested retail price of around $100 USD, while as of right now the Radeon HD 4850 is selling for $110~140+. Clearly though the Radeon HD 4800 series prices will be dropping in the near future. The Radeon HD 5770 offers performance comparable to -- and greater -- than the popular Radeon HD 4870. ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards start out at around $155~160 and go up from there. The expected pricing for the Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards is also around the $160 mark.

Besides offering competitive performance -- and superior in some cases -- to its predecessors, the Radeon HD 5700 series also has the advantages of moving to the 40nm fabrication process, dual-link DVI with DisplayPort and HDMI with Eyefinity support, reduced power consumption, each graphics card is only dependent upon a single 6-pin PCI-E power connector, TeraSCALE 2 Unified Processing Architecture, PCI Express 2.1, and support for DirectX 11 (if it matters to you).

When it comes to the Linux support for the Radeon HD 5700 series, it is there with Catalyst 9.10. However, Eyefinity is not yet supported on Linux and OverDrive is not yet working, but both items will be addressed. Likewise, UVD2 will be coming very soon as well. The ATI Radeon HD 5750 and 5770 are impressive mid-range graphics cards from AMD that will be sure to shake-up the market. There is also open-source support for these graphics cards just out on the horizon.

As our Linux testing progresses on these Juniper GPUs in the Evergreen family, we will be back with more results.