The good news about Radeon HD 5750 is that in the worst-case scenario it achieved the same performance as Radeon HD 4850, being on most situations between 4% and 13% faster than this previous-generation video card. On situations that high-performance is needed, in particular on Far Cry 2 with image quality settings maxed out, Radeon HD 5750 achieved more than double the performance from Radeon HD 4850. And certain configurations that Radeon HD 4850 can’t run (2560x1600 with image quality settings maxed out on 3DMark Vantage and Far Cry 2) the new Radeon HD 5750 can. And the amazing thing is that when Radeon HD 4850 was originally released it cost around USD 200 and the new Radeon HD 5750 costs only USD 140, so you can get similar or higher performance plus DirectX 11 support at a lower cost.

The problem is that on most of our tests the main competitor from NVIDIA, GeForce GTS 250, was faster. Only on 3DMark Vantage (up to 10%) and on Unigine Tropics (between 28% and 34%) Radeon HD 5750 was faster than GeForce GTS 250. For example, on Call of Duty 4 GeForce GTS 250 was between 11% and 22% faster, on Crysis Warhead it was 8% faster and on Far Cry 2 it was between 20% and 39% faster. On Fall Out 3 the difference between the two cards was too small. Keep in mind that on all these games we cranked up all image quality settings to their max.

Radeon HD 5750 is definitely o good replacement for Radeon HD 4850, as explained, but it may fall behind its main competitor, GeForce GTS 250, depending on the resolution and image quality settings you like to play the most. From the six programs we ran, GeForce GTS 250 won on three of them, Radeon HD 5750 won on two of them and they tied on one of them. Since we can’t run all the games available on the market and since our results do not point out a clear winner, we have to claim a technical tie.

We are given our Silver Award instead of our Golden because, as explained, Radeon HD 5750 isn’t faster than its main competitor on all situations.