The Test

For the 5700 series launch, AMD issued some new drivers as the previous 8.66 driver set did not include support for these cards. The driver set we used for these cards is 8.66.6, which is from the same branch as the earlier drivers. In our own testing, we haven’t seen any performance differences between these drivers and the previous ones on the 5800 series cards, but AMD did note that certain configurations might see a small performance boost. As such our results are still using the original 8.66 driver for the 4000 and 5800 series.

Also, as AMD sent us a pair of 5770s, we have tested these cards in a Crossfire configuration. This configuration is largely academic, as 2 5770s is just shy of the price of a 5870 and brings with it all of the limitations of multi-GPU scaling as compared to single-GPU scaling.

On a final note, our 5750 sample is a 1GB card.