The new Cape Verde circuit comes with less Radeon cores than Radeon HD 6770 and 6750, which it replaces. The GCN architecture is more efficient than the VLIW5 based version that is used with the older cards, so hopefully AMD has managed to get more performance from HD 7770 and HD 7750. They will both bring pretty high frequencies, especially HD 7770 that starts at 1000 MHz, or 1 GHz if you like that better.

If above is correct AMD will only bring a marginal boost with lower energy consumption and hopefully low price. With only five days to go we don't have to wait for long to see what the real deal is.

AMD's Radeon HD 7770 mid-range graphics card, which is slated for a little later this month, got its first public shot at 3DMark 11. The card was put through the Performance preset of the benchmark, where it scored P3535 points. The bench was probably driven by an Intel Core i5-2500 processor. The reviewer also took GPU-Z screenshots of this card, revealing low core temperature. Based on the 28 nm Cape Verde GPU, the HD 7700 is said to have 640 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, and 1 GB of memory over a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. It is designed for sub-$200 price points.

It won't be long before cards like this hit $100.

Even after all this time, I don't see a worthy upgrade for my GTX 460. Progress has become very slow with GPUs lately.