XFX Radeon 7770 SOC Final Thoughts

The fact that this card came in last or next to last on most of these tests is an artifact of the cards I had available to test it against. Performance-wise, it competes well with the NVIDIA GTX 460 and the Radeon HD6850, which is very impressive when you consider that Cape Verde represents the bottom end of AMD's new GCN-based cards. Ideally this card should be compared to the older Radeon 6700 series cards. The GCN competitor to the HD 6800 series will be the as-yet-unreleased Pitcairn-based GPUs.

But marketing positioning details mean little to the average gamer: what counts is the performance. And while technically the performance of the R7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition with Double Dissipation is impressive considering it's the low end of AMD's new lineup, out in the real world it's different: why would you buy this $179.99 card when a $134.99 HD 6850 will match or beat it in most performance benchmarks?

You might then ask what other features the HD7770 has that the HD6850 doesn't. Well, how about:

• DirectX 11.1 support
• Ability to support up to 6 monitors simultaneously (with extra-cost cables)
• Ability to support 4K ultra-high-resolution displays
• Power savings, especially in CrossFireX configurations
• Texture compression features mean that 1GB video RAM might take you a little further than 1GB on an older card

While these are all nice features, they all pale into insignificance next to the cruel calculus of frames per second. This card is simply too expensive for the level of performance it returns.

AMD's Tahiti cards startled everyone with their high prices, but many enthusiasts are willing to pay that kind of money because these cards represented the highest single-GPU performance available. The Cape Verde is just as impressive from a performance point of view: it moves today's low-end video card performance solidly into what was previously mid-range performance territory. Unfortunately it does so at prices that are higher than many existing mid-range cards of similar performance. An NVIDIA GTX 460 will return similar performance with the added benefit of PhysX, while costing up to $40 less. A Radeon HD6850 provided similar cost/performance benefits.

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