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ATI Radeon HD 5770 Mac Edition

ATI Radeon HD 5770 Mac Edition: A Retrospective and Relevance in 2025

An analysis of the capabilities and limitations of the legendary graphics card for enthusiasts and owners of older Mac systems.

Architecture and Key Features

TeraScale 2 Architecture: A Legacy from 2009

The ATI Radeon HD 5770 Mac Edition, released in 2010, is based on the TeraScale 2 architecture (codename "Evergreen"). This solution became part of AMD's first generation of GPUs that supported DirectX 11, which was a breakthrough at that time. The manufacturing process is 40 nm, considered advanced for the 2009-2010 era. The card features 800 stream processors, 40 texture units, and 16 raster operation pipelines.

Unique Features for Its Time

The HD 5770 stood out with Eyefinity technology, allowing the connection of up to three monitors simultaneously—a rare capability in those years. However, modern features like ray tracing (RTX), DLSS, or FidelityFX are absent. These technologies require hardware support that AMD only introduced with the RDNA (2019+) and NVIDIA RTX (2018+) architectures.

Memory: Modest Specs for Modern Tasks

GDDR5 and Limited Bandwidth

The card uses 1 GB of GDDR5 memory with a 128-bit bus. The bandwidth is 76.8 GB/s. For games released between 2009 and 2012, this was sufficient (for example, Crysis on medium settings), but by 2025, even basic titles like Fortnite or CS2 require a minimum of 4-6 GB of VRAM. The small memory size and narrow bus become a bottleneck: high-resolution textures and complex shaders lead to FPS drops.

Gaming Performance: Nostalgia Over Relevance

1080p: Only Older Titles and Indie Games

In 2025, the HD 5770 Mac Edition is suitable for retro gaming or less demanding indie titles. For example:

- Half-Life 2: 60+ FPS at maximum settings in 1080p.

- Skyrim (2011): 30-40 FPS on medium settings.

- Stardew Valley: Stable 60 FPS.

Modern AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield won't run due to the lack of DirectX 12 Ultimate support and insufficient VRAM.

Ray Tracing and Upscaling: Unavailable

There are no hardware blocks for RTX or similar solutions from AMD (Ray Accelerators) in TeraScale 2. Software emulation of ray tracing is impossible due to the low computational power.

Professional Tasks: Minimal Suitability

OpenCL and Basic Computations

The HD 5770 supports OpenCL 1.1, allowing it to handle simple tasks:

- Video conversion in HandBrake (50-70% slower compared to modern GPUs).

- Rendering in Blender 4.0: Only basic scenes, processing times 5-10 times longer than a Radeon RX 6600.

CUDA and Specialized SDKs: Not Supported

NVIDIA technologies like CUDA, OptiX, or AI tools are unavailable. The card is unsuitable for machine learning or 3D modeling.

Power Consumption and Heat Dissipation

TDP 108W: Modest, but Requires a Quality PSU

By 2025 standards, the HD 5770 is energy-efficient, but it requires a power supply of at least 450W (considering other components) for stable operation.

Cooling and Case Compatibility

The standard cooling system uses a single fan. Recommendations:

- A case with a minimum of 2-3 fans for heat dissipation.

- Regular thermal paste replacement (every 2-3 years).

Noise levels can reach up to 35 dB under load, which is higher than modern equivalents with passive cooling modes.

Comparison with Competitors: Then and Now

Against Modern Budget Options

By 2025, even entry-level GPUs like the AMD Radeon RX 6400 ($100) or Intel Arc A310 ($90) outperform the HD 5770 by 3-5 times in performance, support DirectX 12 Ultimate, and come with 4 GB of GDDR6.

Historical Comparisons

In 2010, competitors included NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 and GTX 550 Ti. The HD 5770 excelled in energy efficiency, but lagged behind the GTX 560 Ti in performance.

Practical Tips for Users

Power Supply and Compatibility

- Minimum PSU: 450W with an 80+ Bronze certification.

- Connectors: A 6-pin PCIe connector is mandatory.

Platforms and Drivers

- macOS: Official support ended after macOS High Sierra (2017). Patches or emulation are required for use in modern versions (macOS Sonoma and newer).

- Windows/Linux: AMD Catalyst drivers are outdated, but basic functions are available through open-source drivers (e.g., Mesa for Linux).

Pros and Cons of the Graphics Card

Pros:

- Low power consumption for its class.

- Eyefinity support for multi-monitor setups.

- Quieter operation compared to top-tier GPUs from the 2010s.

Cons:

- Outdated APIs (DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1).

- Only 1 GB of VRAM.

- No support for modern technologies (RTX, FSR, AV1).

Final Conclusion: Who is the HD 5770 Mac Edition For?

This graphics card is an artifact of its time, relevant in 2025 only for:

1. Owners of Older Macs (e.g., Mac Pro 2009–2012) who wish to maintain system authenticity.

2. Retro Hardware Enthusiasts building PCs to run classic games and software.

3. Users looking for a temporary replacement for a broken GPU at a symbolic price (on the second-hand market, around $20–40).

For modern tasks—gaming, video editing, 3D rendering—the HD 5770 is unsuitable. Its value today lies in nostalgia and historical significance as one of the first GPUs with DirectX 11 and Eyefinity support. If you need performance, consider budget newcomers of 2025: the AMD Radeon RX 7500 or the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050.

Basic

Label Name

ATI

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

July 2010

Model Name

Radeon HD 5770 Mac Edition

Generation

Evergreen

Bus Interface

PCIe 2.0 x16

Transistors

1,040 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

40 nm

Architecture

TeraScale 2

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

1024MB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

1195MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

76.48 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

13.60 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

34.00 GTexel/s

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.387 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

800

L1 Cache

8 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

256KB

TDP

108W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

N/A

OpenCL Version

1.2

OpenGL

4.4

DirectX

11.2 (11_0)

Power Connectors

1x 6-pin

Shader Model

5.0

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

300W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.387 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 960M

1.475 +6.3%

Radeon Pro WX 3200 Mobile

1.413 +1.9%

Radeon HD 5770 Mac Edition

1.387

GeForce GTX 750 Ti

1.361 -1.9%

Radeon HD 5770

1.333 -3.9%