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AMD ATI Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 Review

Performance on a budget! That is what AMD is bringing you today with the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 5700 series. The new HD 5750 and HD 5770 are priced to sell, but don’t skimp on gaming performance, all while staying cool and power efficient. We have also added Resident Evil 5 and Batman: AA to our gameplay testing.

Resident Evil 5

We are using the full Steam version of Resident Evil 5. This game supports DX10, and we are running in the DX10 API for all video cards tested. For our testing procedure, we are playing the entire "Chapter 2-3 Savanna" chapter all the way to the end where it tallies up scores. All of the in-game cinematic sequences are run via the game engine, i.e., they are not movies; they are full blown 3D sequences being accelerated via the graphics card on the game engine. Our run-through makes heavy use of the particle system, and we have found this level to be one of the more demanding levels in the game, with the rest of the game performing better than this chapter. Our run-through lasts ten minutes.

Card Setup

On each game, as you will see, we are separating the Radeon HD 5770 and comparing it with its counterparts, and then we are separating the Radeon HD 5750 and comparing it with its counterparts. If we had put all the cards together in one table or graph it would have been a mess to analyze.

Therefore, the first section on game page is the HD 5770 in comparison to HD 4870 and HD 5750. The second section is HD 5750 in comparison to GTS 250 and HD 4770. The third section is our apples-to-apples testing at the bottom.

Please also note that the order of video cards in our tables range from most expensive video card to least expensive video card. This way you can see which card at what price point provides the best value.

Highest Playable Settings Radeon HD 5770

The new ATI Radeon HD 5770 performed very close to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB in this game. We were able to run Resident Evil 5 at 2560x1600 with the highest in-game settings in DX10, minus AA, very smoothly on both video cards. The Radeon HD 4870 1GB did edge out higher framerates, but it wasn’t enough to enable 2X AA at 2560x1600. The Radeon HD 5750 did not do too badly here; we were able to run at 1920x1200 with the highest in-game settings in DX10 very smoothly. The 128-bit bus doesn’t seem to be hurting the Radeon HD 5770 much here at all, allowing 2560x1600 easily.

Highest Playable Settings Radeon HD 5750

As we discovered, the ATI Radeon HD 5750 performed very well at 1920x1200 with No AA. When we tried to push RE5 to 2X AA at 1920x1200 on the Radeon HD 5750 we had a pretty large performance drop, so it just wasn’t playable with 2X AA at 1920x1200. However, the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 seems to be doing very good in this game and we were able to use 2X AA at 1920x1200 quite well with that video card, it surprised us. The Radeon HD 4770 also was playable at 1920x1200 with No AA.

For some reason, performance between the Radeon HD 4770 and Radeon HD 5750 is very close in Resident Evil 5. In all of our other games it isn’t, the HD 5750 thoroughly beats the HD 4770, but in this game they are almost dead even for some reason. We think that AMD has some driver tuning to do for this game. We experienced a graphics bug with all HD 5700 series video cards in RE5. It seems that HDR lighting is overblown on the HD 5700 series in this game, meaning the game was very bright and there was too much HDR bloom in comparison to the GTS 250 and Radeon HD 4800 series. We have informed AMD of this problem, so they are aware of it and will hopefully provide a fix.

These screenshots above illustrate the image quality difference we discovered. In the first two screenshots you can see side-by-side how the Radeon HD 4770 compares to the Radeon HD 5770. In the second two screenshots we have the full image shown, scaled down from 1920x1200, so you can see what this looks like full screen. The Radeon HD 5770 clearly is rendering very heavy HDR bloom in this game.

It may mean that the Radeon HD 5700 series cards are doing more work in this game than other video cards, having to render the overblown HDR bloom. This could hurt performance on the Radeon HD 5700 series. So, before we come to any final conclusions on performance in this game we look toward AMD/ATI to examine Resident Evil 5 image quality and performance and hopefully improve that performance.

Apples to Apples

In our apples-to-apples testing we have also broken up testing to compare the Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon HD 5750.

We are testing at 1920x1200 with 2X AA enabled with the highest in-game settings in DX10.

Radeon HD 5770 Comparison

In this graph it is clear the Radeon HD 4870 1GB has a framerate advantage. It isn’t huge, but it is there. Again the highest-playable gameplay difference was the same however.

Radeon HD 5750 Comparison

The Radeon HD 5750, when AA is turned on, does perform faster than the Radeon HD 4770, again we think there is a game bug keeping performance down on the HD 5700 series. The GeForce GTS 250 seems to have a large advantage in performance here.