How much performance can US$100 buy? Not long ago, the answer would have been that unless you found something in the bargain bin or the reject section or maybe in the estate of somebody who moved on to greener pastures, even satisfying just the most marginal demands were slim pickings at best. Things are changing rapidly, though, and all of a sudden, just looking at the $100.- offerings can burn a literal hole in the pocket. With CPU, memory and storage prices plummeting, the one category still a bit behind on the price erosion curve was an affordable graphics card solution that would do justice to the latest games. After all, if the eye candy is programmed into the games and photorealism, not to mention anatomically correct displays of body motions take over in the animations, it would be a shame to reduce game play to stick figure-like characters.

ASUS "Formula" cards sport a fan decor suggestive of a Formula 1 race car

On the other side of the medal are power consumption and the levels of excess we have seen in the past. Frame rate was life a few years ago but try to host a LAN party at home when everybody brings a triple SLI system. The main entertainment in that case will be the run to the circuit breaker box every time one of those boxes enters a severe load state. The bottom line is that there is a need on both the financial and the power budget to be more efficient and that particular segment is the target of the 5700 series of graphics adapter recently released by AMD.

In short, the new genre of card is powered by a new GPU, code name Juniper, to follow the line of evergreen botanic species created with the Cypress chip. Juniper is in essence the same IC as Cypress, just cut in half. This reflects in the number of shaders of all kind as well as the memory interface. More coincidentally, Juniper also does not support double precision floating point operations. The omission of the latter is easy to justify since gaming applications really don’t need double-precision floating point operations, this particular feature is more important for general purpose GPU computing and even there it is used only by a handful of applications.

The block diagram below shows the internal organization of Juniper, which is literally a Cypress die cut in half.

Juniper block diagram, courtesy of AMD

Radeon 5800 (Cypress) vs. 5700 (Juniper) Series Comparison

Similar as in the 5800 series, AMD offers a -50 and a -70 version. Whereas in the case of the 5800 series the distinction between the Cypress and the Cypress Pro is the disabling of 2 of the 20 SIMD arrays in the latter, the 5750 (Juniper Pro) runs on 9 of the 10 SIMD arrays present in the 5770 (Juniper). Add a minor difference in core and memory frequency and there is enough justification for a price delta to put the two cards into different brackets.

At One Glance