AMD ATI Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 DirectX 11 GPUs

The performance of the 5750 is lower than that of the 5770 to the tune of 20-25 per cent which is a big step down for a relatively small reduction in price. On the face of it, the 5750 misses the mark and we'd recommend the 5770 to any gamer on a budget that won’t stretch to a £199 5850.

Better for casual gamers than serious players?

This is only part of the story because we saw something rather interesting when we added Nvidia GTX 260, GTX 280 and GTX 285 cards to the mix. The performance of the mainstream GTX 260 is essentially identical to the 5770, which has forced Nvidia to drop the price of the 260 to £125. The GTX 280 has been replaced by the GTX 285, which can be bought for £219. But even at this reduced price, it struggles to comprehensively demolish the 5770, which is much cheaper. More worryingly for Nvidia, the 280 gets trashed by the slightly cheaper 5850.

We have previously run 3DMark Vantage on an Asus Matrix GTX 285 using the same Core i7 system and this £289 graphics card was beaten hollow by the £299 5870 and also by the £199 5850. Our view is that you'll struggle to play the imminent crop of DX11 games at high image quality settings on the 5750, and the 5770 isn’t much better. We blame the 128-bit memory controller for this failing as the 4890 is significantly better. If we could have the power saving features of the 5750/5770 combined with the performance of 4890 we would be happy.

As things stand, we can't recommend the 5770 to serious gamers - we suggest the more expensive 5850 instead.

Verdict

The Radeon HD 5770 comes close to being a superb graphics card, but AMD has throttled its performance. We suspect that the company is trying to segment the market to leave Nvidia without a leg to stand on and in that respect it has succeeded. Unfortunately, it hasn’t delivered the mid-range graphics card that caters to gamers on a modest budget. ®

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