Despite serious changes in the graphics card market, 2011 may be called a year of “cold launches”. It looks like both, AMD and Nvidia, decided to spend their marketing budgets only on expensive products. Therefore, many interesting new graphics cards in the mainstream segment were announced without much excitement surrounding them. Today we will try to make up for lack of attention to one of them – the AMD Radeon HD 6770.

When AMD unveiled its Radeon HD 5770 graphics card back in 2009, few could have guessed what a bright future awaited it. That card was not meant to be a flagship product because AMD had already released the successful Radeon HD 5870 for that purpose. The Radeon HD 5770 was targeted at the mass market and accomplished its goals very well.

It turned out to be a visiting card of the then-new DirectX 11 API and proved AMD’s technical superiority in the area of discrete graphics solutions. Modestly priced and compact, the Radeon HD 5770 managed to beat every one of its opponents and offered better capabilities than the Radeon HD 4870, the flagship of the previous generation.

The whole year of 2010 passed with our waiting for a worthy rival to come out as both AMD and Nvidia unveiled their new mainstream products. AMD came up with a rather odd Radeon HD 5830 which was massive, power-hungry and expensive but roughly as fast as the older Radeon HD 5770.

Nvidia’s response in the way of the GeForce GTX 460 768MB was quite competitive and popular, even though the card was somewhat more expensive than its AMD opponent. The 400 series was swiftly replaced with the 500 one, though. Positioned as a successor to the GeForce GTS 450, the next mainstream card GeForce GTX 550 Ti encountered the good old Radeon HD 5770 again. With its low power consumption, affordable pricing and compact dimensions, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti could adequately represent Nvidia’s brand in the mainstream market sector.

• READ MORE (Source): Legend Upgrade: PowerColor PCS+ HD6770 1GB GDDR5 Vortex II (DiRT 3 Edition) Review – X-bit labs