Well isn’t this interesting? The 5770 is primarily limited by its [COLOR=##99ccff]core[/COLOR] overall,
not by its memory!
Underclocking the core
20% results in a
11.20% performance loss overall, while doing the same to the memory results in a smaller
8.46% performance hit. This makes the 5770 a reasonably balanced card, with a small bias towards its core. This is unlike
8800 Ultra for example, which showed a massive reliance on its core across the board.
The results actually make sense given a 5770 is basically a 5870 chopped in half, and the 5870 was proven to be primarily limited by its core too. If you shrink the processing power and bandwidth in proportion to each other like the 5770 does (i.e. cutting both in half from the 5870), you’ll end up with very similar performance characteristics.
Also the performance hit increases when moving from 2xAA and 4xAA with the core (
10.58% to
12.45%). We expect this to happen with the memory (and it does) but since the core is also affected, that tells us the ROPs are also bottlenecking the equation to some degree.
As for the individual games, we see
Call of Duty 5,
Wolfenstein,
Call of Duty 4 and
Fear 2 being massively more limited by the core than the memory, while the opposite applies solely to
Bioshock. The rest of the games are affected reasonably equally by both clocks.
