AMD Radeon HD 7770 & 7750 Launch Review - PAGE 18

Since Cape Verde marked the first true update to the Juniper series in two generations, we had high hopes for these new 123mm² graphics processors. However, the performance just never materialized as our results showed both Cape Verde based graphics cards didn’t necessarily bring anything new to the $109 through $159 market segments in terms of performance. Instead what we got was a slight shifting around, where the HD 7770 essentially replaces the HD 6790 in terms of performance, and the HD 7750 takes the performance spot of the HD 6770.

What the HD 77xx series does do right though is delivering a robust feature-set that includes support for Eyefinity 2.0, HD3D technology, ZeroCore Power, DirectX 11.1 and App Acceleration. All of these, along with the performance, make both the HD 7770 and HD 7750 well-rounded graphics cards can produce over 30FPS in DX11 games at the higher resolution settings. Additionally, the performance-per-watt has been significantly improved over the previous generation, as the HD 7770 is able to run with a clock speed of 1GHz and still consume less power than the stock HD 6790, while the HD 7750 has a max power rating of only 55 watts.

Overclocking was also able to improve things on the performance front, at least when it came to the HD 7770. In our labs we were able to turn up the knob on the 1GHz core to 1260MHz, which is an increase of just over 20%. At this speed, the HD 7770 netted on average an additional 15% performance boost, which allowed it to perfom better than the HD 6850, and at times nip at the heels of the HD 6870. We were pleased with these results, as it allows the HD 7770 to offer the same performance as a graphics card with a slightly higher MSRP. The HD 7750 on the other hand was only able to overclock by 10%, which didn’t deliver much of an impact on the performance.

The Cape Verde graphics cards are both well-rounded products that offer better performance-per-watt and performance-per-millimeter, as well as improved thermals and acoustics, than the previous generation. However, if you were expecting the HD 7770 and HD 7750 to effectively perform equal to the HD 6870 and HD 6850, know that Cape Verde just doesn't quite get there.

Most Cape Verde based graphics cards will not come with the default clock speeds though, as most HD aftermarket HD 7770s will come with a GPU clock speed of around 1.1GHz. So, most models on the market will have better overall performance than the AMD reference models displayed in this article.