As far as I can see from Anandtech a 7770 is faster than a 5770, the former costs £90ish, the later used to cost £125, more performance, less money, not exactly terrible is it?
Either way, the low end will always suck, that is the point of the low end basically. There is only so much you can cut down a gpu, if DX11 functionality takes up 200million transistors, on a 7970 with 3000million transistors that is a fairly small amount, on a 600million transistor low end gpu, you're talking about a 1/3rd of the die being for functionality and essentially increasing the die cost by 50% for that one thing. Those aren't remotely close to exact figures, but there is a lot of stuff that just has to be there, big or small gpu, for this reason the largest part of the die difference between a low end and high end gpu is the performance parts of the core, you can bump the core size by 200%, but increase performance by 400% because the shaders/bus/rops are increasing by much more than 200%.
Low end isn't very good, though in comparison APU performance is offering vastly improved value.
As for those rumoured PS4 specs, PS4 with Llano, not a chance in hell, its more likely to be a steamroller based core with some tweaks than a Llano, but a Piledriver based Trinity might be the most likely.
It's hard to say for sure because of time line, Xbox is supposed to launch next year(though sounds like its pushing it) PS4 is supposed to be 2014... but how much later, is it likely to have a different CPU or will they both be identical, hard to know. While it takes a lot of resources at an ever dwindling AMD engineering workforce, they have and can make several different version of the same chip.
It's also very hard to know based on how long ahead they have chips ready vs when they can be finalised and made. Supposedly the Xbox 360 chip is in production already, which makes Steamroller very unlikely and trinity very very likely. if the PS4 chip only went in to production 6 months/year from now, then the extra time might mean they fit a steamroller core in there... much higher single thread performance, better overall performance. Well tweaked code and well designed games that use the cores available won't be particularly limited in gaming though anyway.
PCs are too cash hungry but id never give it up, its kinda like cars they cost a fortune but id never use the bus EVER!!!
