AMD Announces New Radeon HD 7770, 7750 Graphics Cards

AMD Wednesday launched its 28-nm Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition and Radeon HD 7750 graphics cards, the first of which the chip maker claims is the world’s first GPU to break the 1 GHz barrier.

"We were first to 40 nm, first to 28 nm and now we offer the world’s first GPU at 1 GHz; this is a milestone for the graphics industry," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, GPU Division at AMD, in a statement. "AMD continues to deliver superior performance, rich features and world-class power efficiency – we never stop innovating."

The Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition is especially targeted at the gaming enthusiast community, AMD said, and comes equipped with PCI Express 3.0, AMD PowerTune, and AMD Eyefinity 2.0 technology. The company’s PowerTune feature helps ensure high performance levels are optimized to fit within a specific thermal display power (TDP) envelope, while AMD Eyefinity technology allows gamers and PC enthusiasts to stretch a display across as many as six monitors at a resolution of 5760x1080 or higher.

Both the HD 7770 GHz Edition and HD 7750 come with 1 GB of RAM. The lower-end 7750 clocks in at 800MHz compared to the 7770’s 1 GHz, but wins in power efficiency by coming in at under 75 watts and not requiring its own separate power connector.

Like their predecessor the Radeon HD 7970, the HD 7770 and 7750 are based on AMD’s new Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture. AMD has said its new chip architecture is something "vastly different" than anything the company has done in the past five years, as it positions the Radeon HD GPU series to be a heterogeneous one, meaning the chips focus on both computing acceleration and graphics. Prior generation GPUs were only built for one of these two tasks.

"The point of this [Graphics Core Next Architecture] was to start from the ground up and create a GPU that is perfectly suited for both computing and graphics," said Devon Nekechuk, product marketing manager at AMD.

Both cards are available now via retailers and e-tailers worldwide, with select models of the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition starting at $159, and the AMD Radeon HD 7750 1 GB starting at $109.