AMD Radeon HD 7750 review

Following on from the high-end “Tahiti” cards, AMD brings us “Cape Verde” – comprising the Radeon HD 7770 and this card, the HD 7750. The HD 7750 doesn’t boast the 1GHz processor or the 640 stream processors of its bigger brother; here, the 1.5 billion-transistor core is clocked at 800MHz, and there are 512 stream processors packed into eight Graphics Core Next clusters.

It’s worth examining the physical profile of this card, too (on the right in the photo below). The HD 7750 doesn’t require any external power connectors, and it’s a single-slot model that will fit into cramped enclosures. That shows off the increased efficiency of AMD’s 28nm architecture pretty well, as last year’s HD 6750 was significantly bigger and needed a six-pin power connector to work.

The slimmed-down, efficient architecture delivered a relatively modest set of benchmark results. Its 21fps average in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis benchmark is 10fps behind the HD 7770, but a 38fps score at High settings is playable – although only 3fps better than the HD 6750.

In the 1,920 x 1,080 High quality Crysis 2 test, the HD 7750’s 30fps was only 4fps better than the HD 6750, with a similar gap in Battlefield 3 – the HD 7750’s 30fps in the High quality 1,920 x 1,080 benchmark beat the HD 6750’s 27fps.

There was little more disparity in our less demanding games. In Just Cause 2, the HD 7750 averaged 37fps to the HD 6750’s 31fps, and the two cards actually recorded the same score in our Ultra quality 1,920 x 1,080 DiRT 3 benchmark: 28fps.

We wouldn’t mind the same level of performance if this new card came in at the same price – the lower power draw would make that a sensible purchase – but it doesn’t. Early pricing looks to be around £95 inc VAT, for which you could buy a significantly faster Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti, and we haven’t even seen Nvidia’s impending card upgrades yet. AMD needs to drop its pricing to make these cards stand out.