AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition & Radeon HD 7850 Review: Rounding Out Southern Islands
by Ryan Smith on March 5, 2012 12:01 AM ESTThe Test
For the Radeon HD 7800 series launch AMD provided an early version of Catalyst 12.3, version number 8.95.5-120224a. Along with adding support for the 7800 series this adds support for MLAA 2.0 and LOD biasing for DX10+ SSAA. Game performance is largely unchanged, although we did see an increase in SmallLuxGPU performance across Cayman and Southern Islands.
Unfortunately these drivers still do not enable support for the Video Codec Engine (VCE), AMD’s fixed function H.264 encoder. At this point VCE has been absent for over 2 months into what’s likely a 12 month lifecycle for the 7900 series, which is moving the feature into the chronically late territory. AMD is telling us they’ll have more news on VCE later this month, but it’s still not clear when we’ll actually be able to use it.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7950 AMD Radeon HD 7870 AMD Radeon HD 7850 AMD Radeon HD 7770 AMD Radeon HD 7750 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 295.73 AMD Catalyst Beta 8.932.2 AMD Catalyst Beta 8.95.5 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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slypher1024 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Well said bro...Its like Nvidia and Amd secretly team up to maximizing profits.. AMD launch now, over price the product, Nvidia hold out for like 3-5 months, then launches a more powerful product knowing all too well that yes AMD will drop there prices, but we have the more powerful hardware so, persons will still gobble it up..
You would think with the launch of a new product line, AMD would drop the price significantly so it can encourage customer to buy off the remaining stock .
IceDread - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
I do not think it's ok to skip hd 7970 but include nvidia 580. This makes anandtech look like it favors nvidia over amd and the entire site can be questioned.warmbit - Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - link
Here is the link to an interesting overview performance 7870 and 7850 of 5 Web sites competing Nvidia cards - GTX580 and GTX570 and penalties of the previous generation AMD - 6970 and 6950.Analysis of the results of the Radeon 7870 and 7850 in 12 games and 5 resolutions:
http://translate.google.pl/translate?hl=pl&sl=...
You will know the relationship between average interest rates these cards and you will find out in which graphics card is better in the game and resolution.