AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition & Radeon HD 7850 Review: Rounding Out Southern Islands
by Ryan Smith on March 5, 2012 12:01 AM ESTStarcraft II
Our next game is Starcraft II, Blizzard’s 2010 RTS megahit. Much like Portal 2 it’s a DX9 game designed to run on a wide range of hardware so performance is quite peppy with most high-end cards, but it can still challenge a GPU when it needs to.
Once again the 7870 and 7850 place quite close to each other, particularly at 1920. Here the gap between the two is only 6%, the smallest lead the 7870 will ever have over the 7850. The good news is that this means the 7850 ties the GTX 570, however the bad news is that it means the 7870 doesn’t get much farther ahead. The 7800 series ends up looking quite good compared to the 6900 series though, with leads in the 10-15% range,
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Ryan Smith - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
Whoops, flipped a number. Thanks!Dark_Archonis - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
Good to see AMD providing tough competition for Nvidia.Now, when do we see Kepler? Nvidia has been taking their sweet ass time with Kepler, it's frustrating. Fermi overall is a frustrating architecture, in that it's only fast in mid-high and high-end specifications. In mid-range and low-end cards Fermi sucks, when compared to equivalent AMD cards.
Well AT, how long do we have to wait for Kepler? I hope Kepler brings a big performance boost across the board for Nvidia. Intel will only keep improving their integrated graphics, so Nvidia's low and mid-range graphics offerings need to be MUCH better than they currently are, to be worth buying in the future. This is especially true in the laptop market.
Radnor - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
Really for the exception of 7750 witch has a really low power draw, my i will stick with my 4850 CF for now. No reason for upgrade. I mean no new demanding games and 7xxxx ati cards are just expensive.Death666Angel - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
"Once again the 7970 and 7950 place quite close to each other, particularly at 1920. "I think you mean 7870 and 7950? :-)
tech6 - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
For those waiting for nVidea to come to the rescue with an amazing next generation product, I would urge you not to get your hopes up. Nvidea sees their future in the mobile space creating Tegra APUs and mobile graphics and this is where they are spending their R&D budget. The desktop graphics market is simply not growing much anymore.DeViLzzz - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
some people care about Physx so we have to wait on Nvidia lolA5 - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
Why? There's like 2 games that use it.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
There's actually like 2 hundred, but keep drinking the radeonaide.SpaceRanger - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
The lacking of WHQL Drivers has me shaking my head. Come on AMD. It's been 3 months and you STILL can't get a WHQL driver out for the 7xxx series!
DeViLzzz - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
if you already have a 560 Ti I guess you hope for another price drop on the cards so you can SLI themif you can get your hands on an affordable used 6970 or a new Power Color 2 GB 6950 and flash it to a 6970 then do so