AMD Radeon HD 5770 Pictures And Benchmarks

AMD's new mainstream card, codenamed "Juniper", is unveiled sooner than expected, brings 800 SPs.

These are the architectural details, slight less than the rumored 1120SPs that I mentioned on the Radeon HD 5870 article, a figure given in the Anandtech review of the card. Contrary to the 4770, the cards are already pushing GDDR5 to great hights, so it will be harder to compensate on bandwidth by overclocking.

The new die(right) is not half the size of the old, it's estimated to be 180mm² whereas "Cypress" measures 334mm². The picture above isn't exactly on the same scale, as the chip's package is also smaller.

The Radeon HD 5770 brings the same 800SPs that were featured from the Radeon HD 4850, 4870 and 4890, but on a considerably narrower memory bandwidth than the latter two. The price point is slightly high when compared with AMD's current offerings. The Radeon HD 4870 features 50% more bandwidth and the Radeon HD 4890 has 62% more and the shader performance is the same compared with the latter. The new card has some architectural improvements, so it's hard to have an overall figure of performance based on specifications. There is one benchmark available currently:

The performance is only 18% lower than the Radeon 4890 but 3DMark Vantage has shown a better performance scaling for the 5870, almost double of the 4890, that hasn't been the rule throughout game benchmarks.
Overall, the card looks in great shape and there really isn't a better offer from Nvidia, ATI is competing against itself. Given that DX11 support took up some die space, the price point has to be a little higher even if performance isn't remarkable compared with the previous generation price point and performance.
You can get an XFX Radeon HD 4870 with 1GiB for $145, which will deliver better performance in bandwidth depend scenarios. It will depend on how frequently will you switch hardware and if you want to enjoy DX 11 when games are out, or rather wait for a while. On this price range, the only interesting price comparison with older 4800 cards is the one with 1GiB cards, as you can enjoy a better minimum framerates versus 512MiB cards - sometimes by as much as 2 times.
Eyefinity is also present on these cards.

Even cut down to only 720 shaders, the Radeon HD 5750 may well be the more interesting card. Bandwidth is only 4% down rom the 5770 and the core can surely be overclocked.
It's a more balanced card, with the 1GiB version still very well priced at $129. This certainly is looking like it will be my choice among mainstream cards, as cut down cards usually have much lower memory bandwidth that simply kill performance - that has turned this time.