Sapphire HD5770 Flex 1GB Video Card Review

• 1.04 billion 40nm transistors
• TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
  
  • 800 Stream Processing Units
  • 40 Texture Units
  • 64 Z/Stencil ROP Units
  • 16 Color ROP Units
• GDDR5 memory interface
• PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
• DirectX® 11 support
  
  • Shader Model 5.0
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Programmable hardware tessellation unit
  • Accelerated multi-threading
  • HDR texture compression
  • Order-independent transparency
• OpenGL 3.2 support¹
• Image quality enhancement technology
  
  • Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
  • Adaptive anti-aliasing
  • 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
  • 128-bit floating point HDR rendering
• ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology^2,3
  
  • Three independent display controllers
    
    • Drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
  • Display grouping
    
    • Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
• ATI Stream acceleration technology
  
  • OpenCL support¹⁴
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling^4,5
    
    • Native support for common video encoding instructions
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology⁶
  
  • Dual GPU scaling
• ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology⁷
  
  • UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator
  • Advanced post-processing and scaling⁸
  • Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
  • Brighter whites processing (blue stretch)
  • Independent video gamma control
  • Dynamic video range control
  • Support for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2
  • Dual-stream 1080p playback support^9,10
  • DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
  • Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP¹¹
    
    • Max resolution: 2560x1600¹²
  • Integrated DisplayPort output
    
    • Max resolution: 2560x1600¹²
  • Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
    
    • Max resolution: 1920x1200¹²
  • Integrated VGA output
    
    • Max resolution: 2048x1536¹²
  • 3D stereoscopic display/glasses support¹³
  • Integrated HD audio controller
    
    • Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
    • Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
• ATI PowerPlay™ power management technology⁷
  
  • Dynamic power management with low power idle state
  • Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations
• Certified drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP
• Sapphire FleX  Edition Eyeifinity
• 3 DVI Eyefinity+1 Display Port

Speeds & Feeds

• Engine clock speed: 850 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 1.36 TeraFLOPS
• Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec
• Data fetch rate (32-bit): 136 billion fetches/sec
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 34 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 13.6 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 54.4 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 76.8 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 108 Watts
• Idle board power: 18 Watts

Sapphire chose to base this card on ATI’s HD 5770 graphics chip. This is the mainstream version of the HD 5770 video card. The HD 5770 has 800 Stream Processors, which is the same number of SPs as found on the last generation HD 4890 series and half that of the HD 5870 cards that are the top of the line of ATI’s current lineup.

One common feature to all ATI HD 5 series cards is the ability to drive three monitors in Eyefinity setup from any of the cards. This is an advantage over the NVIDIA solution which limited the number of displays on one card to two, with two video cards in SLI mode required for three monitor support. The use of a DisplayPort is required for more than two monitors on most cards, until now.

The AMD 5 series of video cards have DirectX 11 as their core feature. DirectX 11 brings support for Multi-Threading, Shader Model 5.0, DirectCompute and Tessellation to the DirectX graphics API. Multi-Threading is the use of multiple CPU cores to aid in things like game physics and other  processor intense applications. The HD 5770 has the power to do up to 1 TeraFLOP of computing. Tessellation is the subdivision of surfaces like a triangle into a larger group of triangles saving bandwidth over doing a large group of triangles by itself.

Sapphire is the only video card company currently able to use three monitors on a HD 5 series card without using a DisplayPort connector. Most HD 5770 cards come with two Dual-Link DVI ports and a Display Port, but this card is unique. Sapphire decided to include a single Dual-Link DVI port, a Single Link DVI-D port, a HDMI port, and a Display Port connection. For three monitors usage simply attach the HDMI to DVI connection and two DVI connections to the appropriate spot and you are good to go. Other ATI 5 series cards require the use of the Display Port with an active adapter to use three cards. The FleX Edition card has a further feature, the ability to drive a fourth monitor with the DisplayPort adapter being used.  The Single Link DVI connection is able to drive a monitor at 1920x1200@60Hz which is sufficient for most setups and excellent for a three or four monitor setup.