Sapphire Radeon HD 6770

Sapphire HD 6770 1GB review

The AMD HD 5770 was released in October 2009, and nearly two years later, AMD released the HD 6770, which is basically the same card with an HDMI 1.4a port that enables stereoscopic 3D support, 7.1 High bitrate audio and Deep Color support at a slightly higher price tag. The Sapphire specification sheet says that the HD 5770 only supports OpenGL 3.1 and 3.2 whilst the HD 6770 supports OpenGL 4.1. This is inaccurate since the release of the Catalyst 10.12 drivers this support was brought to the HD 5450 and up. The HD 6770 1GB can be purchased for about $110 after rebates and the HD 5770 for about $90 after rebates. The card is built using the 40nm process and uses the Barts core. It even looks the same as the Sapphire HD 5770. The only noticeable difference is that the HD 5770 has 2 dual-link DVI ports while the HD 6770 has one. Sapphire lists the usual plethora of features, including the HDMI 1.4a, 3D support, advanced anti-aliasing features and accelerated video transcoding. This last feature is covered later in the review and appears to be a bit of a misnomer, or at least very misleading.