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

Batman: Arkham City

Batman: Arkham City is loosely based on Unreal Engine 3, while the DirectX 11 functionality was apparently developed in-house. With the addition of these features Batman is far more a GPU demanding game than its predecessor was, particularly with tessellation cranked up to high.

Batman ends up being the one and only test the 7870 loses at when compared to the 6970 at 1920. Most likely exacerbated due to the lack of significant digits from the built-in benchmark, the 7870 hits 59fps while the 6970 hits 60fps. For all practical purposes this is a tie, but it serves as a showcase of the lower bound of the 7870’s performance relative to the 6970: equal to, and no slower.

Otherwise Batman isn’t the strongest game for AMD’s cards. The GTX 570 takes a 2fps(~3%) lead over the 7870 here, while the 7850 does much better versus the GTX 560 Ti. Interestingly the 7870’s lead over the 7850 is extremely small here, with only a tiny 7% gap separating the two cards. This is less than the core clock difference never mind the shader difference, so it would appear we’re looking at a memory bandwidth bottleneck for the 7800 series here, which is reinforced by the 7950’s lead. In which case there’s an interesting opportunity for AMD’s partners here if they equip their cards with 6GHz GDDR5 chips in order to go for a strong factory memory overclock.