The conventional wisdom about sub-$100 video cards is that they'll do in a pinch, as long as you don't plan on gaming much with them. But with its ATI Radeon HD 5570, which was released earlier this year, AMD tried to prove that wrong for the $79 price range—and came close to succeeding. You needed to make certain compromises—the usual, namely resolution and detail—but the card could net you decent-enough performance at lower and middle resolutions to basically meet sufficiently modest expectations.
AMD is betting that even more is possible. It's provisioned a new version of the 5570 that keeps the rest of the card's specs the same, but sports 1GB of GDDR5 RAM instead of the original DDR3—all for about the same price. (For an overview of what GDDR5 is and how it works, check out our article GDDR5 Memory--Under the Hood.) This card might not be eye-poppingly powerful, but it can handle DirectX 11 (which no similarly priced Nvidia card can currently do) and AMD's multimonitor Eyefinity technology for up to three displays—both nice features.
We wanted to see what sort of a performance this difference this made, and whether gaming with the "new and improved" GDDR5 would be even better than before, or the memory change really was just hype.
Compute Power
