ATI Radeon HD 5570 Performance Preview

If you read our review of the Radeon HD 5450 last week and came away with the distinct impression that the card would be perfect for low-cost business PCs and HTPCs but not quite up to snuff in your next gaming rig, you may be more interested in today’s launch of the Radeon 5570.

The Radeon 5570 is ATI’s answer for the $80-$90 graphics card market. It’s based on the same Redwood graphics core first launched with the Radeon 5670 last month. Surprisingly enough, the 5570 gets the full 400-shader configuration found in the 5670, only it’s clocked at lower speeds and outfitted with DDR3 (instead of GDDR5) memory.

ATI will presumably be producing Radeon 5550 GPUs at some point as well with fewer stream processors and a sub-$80 price point, but that chip isn’t launching today.

The 5570 should appeal to the gamer who wants a little more power than what the Radeon 5450 provides. With five times the shaders and a 2X wider memory interface, the 5570 is a much more capable gaming card than the 5450 is. At the same time though, the 5570 can still fit in tight enclosures: the reference board sports a low-profile form factor with single-slot, quiet cooling and 38W typical TDP. That’s something that the more powerful 5670 can’t boast.

Basically the Radeon 5570 is the card for the gamer who needs something that’s either smaller or more affordable than the 5670, but doesn’t want to step all the way down to a 5450, which is intended as more of an upgrade for users who are coming from IGP graphics and don’t necessarily need a card for any serious form of gaming. The Radeon 5570 can run Resident Evil 5 and Batman Arkham Asylum at 30+ fps at 1600x1200 with high settings and 4xAA in the case of RE5. Modern Warfare 2 runs at 25 fps at the same resolution with 4xAA.

Again, you’re not going to confuse a 5570 for a Radeon 5700 or Radeon 5800 series card, but if you’re a casual gamer who only plays the occasional FPS or cutting edge title, or perhaps you’re still addicted to older games like Counter-Strike and you only game at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200, the 5570 may be the card for you.

The following chart sums up how the 5570 compares to the rest of ATI’s sub-$100 Radeon 5000 series lineup:

ATI's sub-$100 Radeons
	Radeon 5670	Radeon 5570	Radeon 5450
Stream Processors	400	400	80
Graphics Core Clock Speed	775MHz	650MHz	650MHz
Compute Performance	620 GFLOPS	520 GFLOPS	104 GFLOPS
Texture Units	20	20	8
Texture Fill-rate	15.5 GigaTexels/sec	13 GigaTexels/sec	5.2 GigaTexels/sec
ROPs	8	8	4
Pixel Fill-rate	6.2 Gigapixels/sec	5.2 Gigapixels/sec	2.6 Gigapixels/sec
Memory Clock Speed	1000MHz GDDR5 (4Gbps data rate)	900MHz DDR3 (1.8Gbps data rate)	Up to 800MHz DDR3
Memory Interface	128-bit	128-bit	64-bit
Memory Bandwidth	64GB/sec	28.8GB/sec	Up to 12.8GB/sec
Idle Board Power	70.04W	42.7W	19.1W
Max Board Power	14.95W	9.69W	6.4W
MSRP	$99+	$79-$85	$49-$59

Notes

Because it retains the same shader and texturing configuration as the Radeon 5670, the 5570 should perform decently in cases where it isn’t bound by its available memory bandwidth, especially if you OC the graphics core. In other words, keep your screen resolution and anti-aliasing in check, as these are two factors that can sap your GPU’s memory subsystem pretty quickly.

ATI’s outfitting reference boards with 1GB of DDR3 memory clocked at 900MHz (1800MHz effective), while out back you’ll find DVI, HDMI, and VGA outputs. By skipping DisplayPort, the card is probably more compatible with the displays most end users are running now, but as a result the reference board lacks Eyefinity support (remember, at least one DisplayPort connection is required for Eyefinity)

Don’t get too fixated on the reference design though – once again ATI is giving their board partners lots of flexibility here and you’ll see a wide variety of 5570 configurations as a result.

ATI says 5570 boards will initially sell for $79-$85 at retail; that’s priced awfully close to the Radeon 5670, not to mention previous generation cards like the Radeon 4670 and GeForce 9600 GT. We’ll be keeping an eye on this in the benchmarks…