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About two and half weeks ago the curtain was raised on the new HD 5000 series from ATI. In typical fashion, the HD 5870 was the flagship introductory entry to the new generation. And now, in not so typical fashion, only a short time later ATI has released a mid-range video card showcasing the new technology: the HD 5770, and the HD 5750. Today we'll be taking a look at both.

From the get-go, these two video cards appear to bring a world of promise. Of course we won't know how they stack up until after go through the benchmarks, but judging from their specifications, and the feature set introduced with the HD 5870 and HD 5850, the HD 5770 looks like it could shake things up incredibly. These two cards are going to be responsible for a whole swath of older video cards models becoming discontinued almost overnight. But perhaps we are getting too far ahead of ourselves.

If this is your first introduction to ATI's new generation of GPU technology, here are a few key points to keep in mind. First off, you have compatibility with DirectX 11. Unlike DirectX 10, which never really amounted to much at all for actual gamers playing actual games, it looks like DirectX 11 will be a new case entirely. Thanks to Compute Shaders, the parallel processing power of the GPU will be much more open to game dev's utilizing the GPU for non-graphics related processes, like perhaps A.I and physics. Besides that, are numerous tesselation enhancements, and multi-threading optimization. DirectX 10 hardware will be able to handle DirectX 11 games, but will not be able to take full advantage of the capabilities. 

Beside DirectX 11, and beside the new raw levels of horsepower brought by the HD 5000 generation, ATI has also added Eyefinity to the feature-set. This enables you to create a metadisplay using up to three displays on each video card. This amount stacks if used with CrossFireX, so you can conceivably use a whopping 24 displays to form one titan display, all from one computer, if you had the hardware.

If we are going by code names, the HD 5770 and HD 5750 are Junipers. The HD 5750 is the 'Pro' model, and the HD 5770 is the 'XT' model in that sense. Perhaps in part due to ATI's experience with the 40nm process, and with a relatively smaller GPU die size, these video cards are priced ' affordable' at the recommend retail price of $160 for the HD 5770, and about $130 for the HD 5750.

The HD 4770 was a winner last generation. Let's see if the HD 5770 is going to follow in its foot steps, flounder, or perhaps mark even mark out some new, memorable territory on its own.