AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition & Radeon HD 7850 Review: Rounding Out Southern Islands

Total War: Shogun 2

Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite (on higher end hardware at least).

Shogun 2 ends up being an interesting benchmark for the 7800 series today for a number of different reasons. First and foremost of course is a strong performance lead for the 7800 compared to both the 6900 series and NVIDIA’s lineup.  The 7870 leads the GTX 570 by 26%, and even the GTX 580 is over 10% slower. At the same time the 7850 ties the GTX 570, while taking a smaller 14% lead over the GTX 560 Ti.

More importantly however, it’s the first test in our suite where even the 1.25GB of VRAM on the GTX 570 isn’t enough. One of AMD’s planks for marketing the 7800 series will be that they have 2GB of VRAM versus 1.25GB on the GTX 570 or 1GB on the GTX 560 Ti, and this is a showcase of that difference. Shogun 2 knows how much VRAM it needs for any given setting configuration and won’t run on cards that don’t meet the requirements – as a result the GTX 570 and GTX 560 Ti can’t even compete at 2560. This is admittedly a higher resolution than most of the cards were designed for, but it showcases the importance of moving beyond 1GB of VRAM going forward. Between Shogun, BF3, and Skyrim, we’re seeing modern games that need 1.5GB of VRAM or more to fully spread their wings.