As we predicted in a recent article dealing with AMD’s new graphics cards from the HD 7000 series, after the high-end models were presented, miniature chips would follow, replacing the very popular Juniper-based products. The Juniper GPU “survived” for two Radeon generations, which is mostly due to its unprecedented success, one that’ll be hard to repeat, if there even is the need for such a thing.
This GPU first saw the light of day on Radeon HD 5770, making a re-appearance a year later on the rebranded Radeon HD 6770. NVIDIA never really came up with a proper response to these two cards. The first time around, they tried to compete with GTS 450, which wasn’t even nearly adequate for such a battle. GTX 550 Ti did a little better, but the latter was still slower by a good 10%.
This wouldn’t have been a problem had GTX 550 Ti been cheaper than its competitor, but not only did it lose in the performance field, it fared similarly in the retail one too. More ambitious companies such as ASUS tried to rectify this situation by putting high-quality cooling and factory-overclocked models out on the market, with products such as the TOP series. Yet even a heavily tightened GTX 550 Ti, with core clocks of up to 1 GHz, couldn’t do anything. Up to this day, Radeons HD 5770 and HD 6770 have remained in widespread use due to their good performance, but it’s now time for them to retire and be rightfully replaced by an adequate heir. The chip taking the price/performance throne from Juniper is codenamed Cape Verde, and we have to admit that expectations are very high from both models it’s featured on.
