ATI Radeon HD 5700: New Horizons

Following the Radeon HD 4700, the Radeon HD 5700 series is meant to push the performance of affordable graphics cards to a whole new level. At the moment of the announcement AMD introduced two Juniper-based products: Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon HD 5750. The recommended prices of these two models are $159 and $100, respectively. Here is how the new cards compare with the previous generation:

Thus, the Juniper is comparable to the RV770/790 in terms of resources excepting the 128-bit memory interface. The similar transistor count of AMD’s new and old GPUs indicates that, too. Considering the architectural innovations and improvements, we can expect the Radeon HD 5770 to perform as well as or even somewhat better than the previous-generation solutions, except at very high resolutions together with full-screen antialiasing where its memory bandwidth may become a bottleneck. The new card is better than the Radeon HD 4770 in memory bandwidth but inferior to the Radeon HD 4890, GeForce GTX 275 and GeForce 260 Core 216.

Priced at only $100, the Radeon HD 5750 has much better specs than the Radeon HD 4770 and has every chance to get the title of the best entry-level graphics card. As users of such cards tend to run them for a year or more without upgrading, the card’s DirectX 11 support is going to come in handy.

So, the RV830 Juniper is architecturally one half of the RV870 Cypress.

It has 10 rather than 20 SIMD cores for a total of 160 universal superscalar execution processors each of which incorporates 4 universal ALUs, 1 special ALU capable of executing complex instructions, a branch control unit and a set of general-purpose registers. Of course, the GPU supports all DirectX 11/DirectCompute 11 features. Each SIMD core is serviced by four texture processors (a total of 40 TMUs).

The raster back-end subsystem is cut in half, too. There are 16 RBEs and 2 memory controllers, so the memory bus width is reduced from 256 to 128 bits. The size of L2 caches is the same at 128KB per controller (for a total of 256KB). 8KB L1 caches have also been left intact. The local and global data shares, 32 and 64KB respectively, are the same size as in the RV870, too. Again, the RV830 can be considered one half of the RV870 but technically, without considering the new features and architectural improvements, one such half is almost as good as the whole RV790.

The Juniper has inherited the enhanced connectivity its elder brother. Both models of the new series can service up to three monitors simultaneously. This has little practical value for gamers who play modern games as the Radeon HD 5700 won’t be able to deliver a high frame rate at such a huge resolution, but you may try some older titles with a 3-monitor configuration. Of course, this feature can also be beneficial for designers, artists and other people who want to have a larger desktop.

Now, let’s have a closer look at the new hardware.