Radeon HD 5770 review - Introduction

With much success and bravura ATI launched their series 5800 graphics cards roughly a week or three ago. New features like Eyefinity and a DX 11 class compatible product made the release of the Radeon HD 5850 and  5870 a grand success ever since its launch, each SKU that has been placed on the market is selling incredibly well. And that's a grand testimony for ATI/AMD as it means they did their homework right and delivered a product in style.

The two 5800 series products are segmented in the high-end range and as such do come with a fairly spicy price tag making all the new features out of reach for a lot of people. ATI is going to address that today already with the releases of series 5700 graphics cards. Two products will be releases in the mid-range segment. However, they will be stacked and loaded with exactly the same features as the 5800 series, yet their performance is cut-down and obviously in return, the pricing has been made much more attractive.

In collaboration with ATI and HIS we will test the Radeon HD 5770 in single and a CrossfireX (Multi-GPU) setup. It's a product that performance wise positions itself directly in-between the Radeon 4850 and 4870, yet comes with all the features that the 5870 for example offers.

So what's the buzz for series 5000 ?  Well, ATI has been focusing on three primary features and key selling points for the series 5000 products. First off, the new graphics adapters are of course DirectX 11 ready. With Windows 7 and Vista being DX11 ready all we need are some games to take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. DX11 is going to be good. More on that later on in this article of course.

Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is of course Eyefinity, the ability to connect one to up-to six monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredibly wide monitor resolution to play games in. It's nice, it is niche and yes... certainly not an option many of you will use... but really it is breathtaking as well. We'll explain this in a separate chapter.

The third big and prominent feature is of course performance for money. It's new it's affordable, it has AMD written all over it ... head on over to the next page where we'll meet and greet Juniper aka Radeon HD series 5700.