New AMD Graphics Cards Bring HD 5800 Mainstream

On Tuesday, AMD announced the ATI Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon HD 5750, which bring AMD's high-end graphics-card architecture down to mainstream prices.

When AMD announced the HD Radeon 5800 series of graphics cards in September, the announcement sent shock waves through the industry; AMD's new cards offered a substantial performance boost over rival cards from Nvidia, and for a competitive price, to boot.

Now, instead of paying close to $400 for a high-end card, AMD will sell the HD 5750 at approximately $109 to $129, according to analysts, and the HD 5770 at prices close to $159. The reason? A die size about half the size of the HD 5870, resulting in a sharp decrease in manufacturing costs and therefore prices.

While the performance may be a fraction of what the 5800 series offers, the feature set isn't. Moreover, the cards also support the AMD CrossFireX technology, meaning that an additional card can be added in the future to increase performance further. (The 5800 series allows two, three or four additional CrossFireX cards.) The existence of the Radeon HD 3870 X2, a dual-GPU card, also holds out the possibility that a dual-GPU card may be released in the future.

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