AMD Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition Video Card Review

Conclusions

AMD is promoting the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition as a competitor to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. It really crushed this video card, being between 14% and 29% faster than it. But there is just a “small” problem: the GeForce GTX 550 Ti costs USD 130, while the Radeon HD 7770 GHz costs USD 160. At this price range, the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition in reality competes with the Radeon HD 6850 and the GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB video cards that proved to be superior. Let’s see.

The Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition was faster than the Radeon HD 6850 and the GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB only at Deus Ex: Human Revolution (by 4% and 8%, respectively), being marginally faster than the Radeon HD 6850 on DiRT3. All video cards achieved the same performance level on Battlefield 3. On all the other games and simulations we ran, the other two video cards were faster. The Radeon HD 6850 was between 3% and 19% faster, while the GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB was between 8% and 18% faster.

On Media Espresso, however, the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition was substantially faster than its competitors, with an advantage of 12% over the GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB and 27% over the Radeon HD 6850. It was also 63% faster than our Core i5-2500K for video transcoding. This shows that the new “GCN” architecture is really optimized for the processing of “regular” programs, as promised by AMD.

Analyzing gaming performance alone, we think that if you have around USD 150 to spend on a video card, you will be better off buying one of the “older” video cards.