XFX Radeon R7770 Black Edition Video Card

Written by David Ramsey

Tuesday, 14 February 2012

Table of Contents: Page Index
XFX Radeon R7770 Black Edition Video Card
AMD Southern Islands GPU
Closer Look: XFX Radeon HD 7770
FX-777A-ZDSC Detailed Features
Features and Specifications
Video Card Testing Methodology
DX11: 3DMark11
DX11: Crysis 2
DX11: Batman: Arkham City
DX11: Aliens vs Predator
DX11: Lost Planet 2
DX11: Metro 2033
DX11: Unigine Heaven 2.5
XFX 7770 Super OC Temperatures
Power Consumption and Overclocking
XFX Radeon 7770 Final Thoughts
XFX R7770 Black Edition Conclusion

Page 13 of 17

DX11: Unigine Heaven 2.5

The Unigine "Heaven 2.1" benchmark is a free publicly available tool that grants the power to unleash the graphics capabilities in DirectX-11 for Windows 7 or updated Vista Operating Systems. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. With the interactive mode, emerging experience of exploring the intricate world is within reach. Through its advanced renderer, Unigine is one of the first to set precedence in showcasing the art assets with tessellation, bringing compelling visual finesse, utilizing the technology to the full extend and exhibiting the possibilities of enriching 3D gaming.

The distinguishing feature in the Unigine Heaven benchmark is a hardware tessellation that is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality transcends conjured by your hand. The "Heaven" benchmark excels at providing the following key features:

Native support of OpenGL, DirectX 9, DirectX-10 and DirectX-11
Comprehensive use of tessellation technology
Advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion)
Volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm
Dynamic simulation of changing environment with high physical fidelity
Interactive experience with fly/walk-through modes
ATI Eyefinity support

Unigine Heaven 2.5
- High Shaders, Normal tessellation, 4xAA, 8xAF

Cost Analysis: Unigine Heaven (1920x1200)

$139.00 GeForce GTX 460 costs $5.99 per FPS

$190.00 GeForce GTX 560 costs $6.31 per FPS

$330.00 GeForce GTX 570 costs $9.54 per FPS

$135.00 Radeon HD 6850 costs $5.34 per FPS

$240.00 Radeon HD 6950 costs $7.06 per FPS

$180.00 Radeon HD 7770 costs $7.23 per FPS

Test Summary: The XFX HD7770 matches the 6850 in this test, which is impressive.

Graphics Card	GeForce GTX 460	GeForce GTX 560	GeForce GTX570	Radeon HD6850	Radeon HD6950	Radeon HD7770
GPU Cores	336	384	480	960	1408	640
Core Clock (MHz)	675	822	732	775	850	1120
Shader Clock (MHz)	1350	1645	1464	N/A	N/A	N/A
Memory Clock (MHz)	1800	2100	1900	1000	1300	1300
Memory Amount	1GB	1GB	1280 MB GDDR5	1GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	1GB GDDR5
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	320-bit	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit

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Comments

# RE: XFX Radeon R7770 Black Edition Video Card — Ali 2012-02-16 02:32

People please wait again for another 3 or 4 months to get this product come to its true place ... i m getting frustrated with such high pricing strategy from AMD

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# Voltage Control — Chris 2012-02-16 08:11

I might be wrong, but I did not see if this card allows control of the vCore. This is a must have option IMHO. Not all cards allow this. For Example, the VisionTek 6850's are not able to up the voltage. Not even flashing the BIOS with a custom profile will work.

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# RE: Voltage Control — David Ramseyd 2012-02-16 08:17

Right now the various hacking tools (MSI Afterburner) for the AMD GCN graphics cards are in a pretty primitive state. I wasn't able to get voltage control working for the 7970 and 7950 cards, and didn't even try with the 7770. I'm sure this will change in the future, though.

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# No physx a con? — Pat 2012-02-16 10:09

I don't understand why bmr keeps giving AMD cards a negative because they have no physx. It's not like they even have a choice since physx is proprietary. It's like holding nVidia cards responsible because they don't support eyefinity. I respect your opinion on including this, I just would be interested why you choose to include that.

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# RE: No physx a con? — David Ramseyd 2012-02-16 10:20

According to NVIDIA, PhysX is an open standard anyone can write to. They were saying this as early as 2008. There are doubtless behind-the-scenes reasons nobody else has implemented it; and there are competing physics engines like Havok and Bullet, but it all begs the point: it's a significant advantage to NVIDIA cards since so many games use it. Your Eyefinity example isn't a good one since NVIDIA provides equivalent functionality with their "Surround" feature. I tend not to weight either of these too heavily since only a tiny fraction of users run triple monitor setups.

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# RE: XFX Radeon R7770 Black Edition Video Card — Pat 2012-02-16 10:40

I know you don't push it too much which I appreciate because there are enough people that don't understand what it means exactly. I don't begrudge nVidia for owning physx but as far as I know it will only run on nVidia hardware. Sure, the software may be open for development but if it isn't able to run on anything but nVidia cards doesn't that make it being an open standard kind of pointless? As for the eyefinity example. I realize it's not the clearest example but my point was that it's an AMD technology that nVidia doesn't have. You bring up that nVidia has surround however surround isn't exactly equivalent considering anything I can find about says it supports a max of three monitors whereas eyefinity supports 6. I'm not saying one or the other is better just that they're different in functionality. I can see your point though and the more I think about it, the more I see the reason for including physx. I just haven't seen it come up as a topic on here before. It would be interesting to see a review on physx, not in pure numbers but rather simply did it look/feel much better with physx? Hey, maybe with enough pressure AMD would pick it up and use it. I can dream huh?

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# RE: RE: XFX Radeon R7770 Black Edition Video Card — David Ramseyd 2012-02-16 10:46

How much of a difference PhysX makes depends of course on how well the developer uses it in a game. Probably the best showcases for the technology are the Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City titles. The games are perfectly playable without PhysX but it really adds to the atmosphere when it's enabled.

You're right about Surround being limited to 3 monitors, which is probably why AMD has been showing off 5-monitor setups of late. I know one or two people with triple monitor setups, but the only 5-monitor setup I've ever seen was an an AMD press event. Impressive, yes; real-world utility, well...

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# RE: XFX Radeon R7770 Black Edition Video Card — Pat 2012-02-16 11:25

Well I like the battle that's shaping up with this gen of cards. nVidia has their advantages, AMD has theirs (primarily first strike). I just hope nVidia punches back hard enough that they force AMD to drop prices. This HD 7770 would be just what I need to replace the 8800GT that recently died in my spare computer. Unless you know something about the next nVidia cards you'd like to share ;)

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# RE: RE: XFX Radeon R7770 Black Edition Video Card — David Ramseyd 2012-02-16 12:12

If you Google "Kepler", you'll know everything about the forthcoming NVIDIA cards that I do...

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# RE: RE: RE: XFX Radeon R7770 Black Edition Video Card — Pat 2012-02-16 12:13

Just teasing. I look forward to a review on one as soon as you get it though! bmr is my go to!

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# Good and bad,... — realneil 2012-02-16 11:35

I like the looks of this card. It's striking.
But the price turns all of that off immediately. If the price were to fall a ~good~ bit, I could see running a pair of them in my A8-3850 Vision PC. The low power usage and lower heat appeal to me.

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# RE: Good and bad,... — Pat 2012-02-16 12:07

Yeah I think if they can get down to $130-$140 that'd be great. I mean, yeah I'd like it to drop more but I don't see that happening unless nVidia REALLY kicks their butt in this segment

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# amd is overpriced — AMD Radeon 2012-02-16 21:10

yes, amd is now selling high price vga card

you know, it is still have driver issue with crossfire
check this AMD Radeon 7970 Crossfire Skyrim Benchmark

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