AMD's Radeon HD 5670: Sub-$100 DirectX 11 Starts Today
by Ryan Smith on January 14, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
5500 Series and 5450 Pre-Announcement
Along with today’s launch, AMD is also pre-announcing the 5500 series and the 5450. We say pre-announcing as they’re not launching the cards today, nor are they showing off the complete specifications of the cards. Today is an announcement of what they’ll be launching in February, the 6th and final month in their 6 month 4 chip launch window for the Evergreen family.
We’ll start with the 5500 series. There is one card pre-announced thus far, which we expect will get a real name (e.g. 5570) at launch. The 5500 series is specified for less than 50W load power, and will be a low-profile actively cooled card. In a full-height computer, a 3rd display output port can be attached, giving the card the ability to drive 3 monitors in an Eyefinity configuration.
The other card is the 5450, which is another low-profile card, but this time passively cooled. It too can drive 3 monitors in Eyefinity mode when put in a full-sized case to allow a 3rd display output. We don’t know what the power usage is, beyond the fact that AMD is calling it an “ultra low power” card.
Both of these cards will have the full 5000 series feature set, most importantly including audio bitstreaming. This should make either of these cards the great HTPC card we’ve been expecting to come out of the 5000 series, depending on how much rendering power you need.
As we stated before, both of these cards will be launching sometime in February. We do know more about these cards, but at this point we’re not allowed to talk about them. What we can suggest is that you look at our Mobility Radeon 5000 article, where AMD announced Redwood and Cedar in mobile form ahead of the desktop cards, and then take a very close look at this slide of AMD’s chip stack. The astute among you should be able to infer some additional information about these forthcoming cards.
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Calin - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
These lower end series are not intended to run high resolution monitors in "heavy" games at performance modes. For that, there is the 5800 series.These 5600 series seems ok for every game in 19" resolutions and lowered quality, which make them perfect for many people. They are a huge step up from integrated graphics :)
BelardA - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
How many people actually buy 19" displays anymore? Wide screen isn't like the older 4:3 screens, so a 19" LCD is kind of small.At $125~150, there isn't much reason to NOT get a 20~21" class monitor.
While the 5600s are a bit on the slow side, there is a NEED to have low-end graphics cards that meets some standards and having an entire product line support DX11 is still a good thing.
Once the price of the 5670 gets down to $75 then it will be a good value card. But not at $100~120 which is the current price on Newegg. And remember, many people don't have the PSUs (or budget) to get support a 5700 series card. I think once 40nm manufacturing matures for TMSC (sp?), the pricing will go down more.
As an owner of a 4670, the 5670 is easily a faster card... but I believe AMD screwed up. The $100 4770 was almost on par with the 4850 and easily faster than the 4830. There is NO reason the smaller die 5670 to be ANY slower than the 4770. That is ALL the 5670 needed to be. But then again, the $135 (today) 5750 is starting to be constantly faster than the 4850 card (good).
SO the real problem is pricing. If the $100 5670 was almost as fast as the $135 5750, there would be no need for the 5750. Also, other than PSU requirements - it would be stupid to spend $120 for a 1GB 5670 when the 5750 is $15 more and almost twice the performance.
Zool - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
"They are a huge step up from integrated graphics :)"Price wise the 5670 is a huge step too from integrated graphic. I was mainly comparing the 5xxx and 4xxx series and thats almost a zero jump.
Zool - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
But of course why should AMD compete with itself when it still beat everything that nvidia has in price.I think i will skip this generation too and wait for the 6K cards.
Zool - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
The 5700 cards are on the same level than 4800 cards and the 5600 cards are very close to 4600 cards. Now if u enable DX11 in games u will se performance way below both 4800 and 4600 for both dx11 cards against they counterpart. Thats downgrading not upgrading.And the X700 vs X800 series trick and price range change is quite disturbing too.
Zool - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
How can game developers make better looking games when the performance/price sits on the same level with each generation ? DX11 is very taxing if u want to make it properly. Those fancy new efects, postprocessing with Dx compute just eats much more shader power,bandwith. Performance wise 4800 owners can upgrade only to 5800 cards (dx11 speeds with 5700 is very weak) which price level is another category.But that can happen if your only competition is rebranding a 2006 card architecture because the GT200 was overdesigned. The disturbing part of this is that nvidia cant learn from its mistakes and make another giant chip second time GT300 which is this time even late :).
Zool - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
Its quite strange that they downgraded the 5670 TMUs from 32 to 20. With the 60+ GB/s the 32 TMUs could be much more usefull than with the 4670 bandwith. All games use multitexturing to some degree quite some time.Spoelie - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
Far Cry 2: the text states that the 5670 and the 4850 have the same amount of memory and that the 5670 beats the 4850.However, looking at the test setup, the 5670 is the 1GB version and the 4850 is the 512MB version, and the test results support this. The gap between the 4850 and the 4870 is *way* too big to not be memory size constraint.
As such, the only reason the 5670 "beats" the 4850 in this test is the memory size, and the supporting text is wrong.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
The 5670 is 512MB.The facts have been corrected to fit with reality.
Spoelie - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
hmmm ok, then the Far Cry 2 results are a bit peculiar. The 4850 has the same amount of memory but more of everything else and is 25% slower. The performance of the 5670 seems to fall in line with its compute resources, as if it doesn't have a memory bottleneck. This made me think you had a 1GB card. My apologies.