In less than a day from now, AMD is expected to make official the Radeon HD 7700 graphics card series, but for those of you that can’t wait to see how these new Cape Verde-based GPUs perform, a Chinese website has posted a benchmark of the HD 7770 running 3DMark 11.
The Radeon HD 7770 card used by the tester was apparently paired with an Intel Core i5-2500 processor and was put through a 3DMark 11 run using the Performance preset.
Using this preset, AMD’s upcoming graphics card achieved a score of P3535, according to VR-Zone.
Much like the Tahiti cores AMD used for the graphics cards in the Radeon HD 7900 series, the Cape Verde XT GPU is based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
However, this graphics core has a much smaller die than the Tahiti GPUs (123mm2 vs 365mm2) since it packs only a fraction of the shaders of its older brother.
More precisely, the Cape Verde XT features 640 streaming processors, 40 texture units and 16 ROP units, all installed together with a 128-bit wide memory bus.
In the Radeon HD 7770, this is connected to 1GB of GDDR5 video buffer, which is clocked at 1,125MHz (4.5GHz data rate) in order to deliver 72GB/s of bandwidth, while the GPU operating frequency is set at 1000MHz.
Thanks to the new 28nm fabrication process used for AMD’s GCN graphics cores, the Radeon HD 7770 requires just a single 6-pin PCIe connector, which seems to imply that it needs just a little over 100 Watts in order to operate.
The HD 7770 will also support 2-way CrossFireX and packs 3 display outputs, one DVI, one HDMI and a mini-DisplayPort connector. The card is expected to be released on February 15 with an MSRP way under $200 US (152 EUR).
