Southern Islands architecture with a friendly price tag

By Phil IwaniukFebruary 15th

AMD showed its hand first in this year's GPU arms race with Nvidia... by turning it into last year's arms race.

While Nvidia has kept shtum about its upcoming new 'Kepler' architecture and looks to do so until Spring, AMD stole the march and released the first of its new 7-series cards, the AMD HD 7970, a few days before Christmas 2011.

That sure was odd timing, but it taught us a lot about AMD's new Southern Islands architecture, specifically the 'Tahiti' chip. It's fully PCIe 3.0-supported, uses a 28nm manufacturing process to pack more transistors onto a PCB than ever before, and apart from offering very quick DX11 game frame rates, it's a highly energy efficient beast.

When your system drifts off into standby, the Tahiti card switches itself all but off too, minimising power draw.

The HD 7970's whopping £440 price made all those neat features all but irrelevant to the gaming masses though, so we're putting our hopes on this HD 7770 to deliver the best bits of the new AMD architecture for a more palatable price.

The 'Cape Verde' chip that this HD 7770 is built around makes full use of the new Graphics Core Next architecture like its big bro, with ZeroCore power efficiency in tow and a solid 1,000 MHz core clock. If it can offer a slice of the HD 7970's performance for this price, it's on to a winner
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AMD Radeon HD 7750 review

AMD's next-gen arrives in budget trim

If AMD's HD 7970 debut Southern Islands card arrived in a fancy tux heralding a bunch of world firsts (first PCIe 3.0 card, first DirectX 11.1-compatible), this HD 7750 turns up to little fanfare in a Burton polo shirt and trainers.

The new Graphics Core Next's architecture has already been shown off by the HD 7970 and those 4.3 billion transistors pack quite a punch, as it turns out, trouncing the very best of last generations' GPUs by around 20-30% at mega-high res.

The HD 7970 is also excruciatingly pricey though. At £440 its staggering performance and overclocking capability are out of reach to most gamers.

The HD 7750 should arrive hitting the right side of £80, making it an altogether friendlier proposal, and these new-gen AMD cards boast some excellent power efficiency by shutting off all but one core when your system enters power save mode.

But what's this HD 7750 missing out on to hit that price point? Does it still make high-res screens sing
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