AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition & Radeon HD 7850 Review: Rounding Out Southern Islands
by Ryan Smith on March 5, 2012 12:01 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization 5, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
CivV has something interesting going on at 1920; can you spot it? For the first and only time, the 7870 ends up leading over the 7950, if only by 2%. Even though AMD’s performance improvements in CivV seem to largely be driven by compute shader performance improvements, there’s apparently still something going on with the frontend or the ROPs that makes the 7870’s higher core clockspeed matter.
In any case this is another game where the 7800 comes out looking quite good. Relative to the 6900 series there is no competition: the 7800 series is 40-50% faster. The lead against NVIDIA’s cards isn’t nearly as large, but it’s still 8% for the 7870 versus the GTX 570, and 9% for the 7850 versus the GTX 560 Ti.
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medi01 - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
AMD released cards that are better than competitors in all areas: pricing, power consumption, performance, yet he found a way to be "dissapointed"You can't reason with fanboi.
Kiste - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
You're the one who seems obsessed with which company releases the "better cards".I'm merely commenting on the 78xx line of cards, which I find underwhelming in terms of price/performance ration - and I am not alone wiht this if you bothered reading the other comments here.
So who's the fanboy?
formulav8 - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
You are. Your annoying as well.chizow - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
Try laying off the personal attacks and focus on the arguments instead.I don't see how anyone can defend the pricing of AMD's 7 series stack in good conscience though, if roles were reversed and Nvidia were the one doing this, EVERYONE would be disappointed too I'm sure.
Kaboose - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
wasn't it everyone who said the 6000 series was too expensive back in october of 2010 and when Nvidia released the 500 series prices would come down a lot, then Nvidia released the 500 series right in between what AMD had and neither company really lowered prices for months. I think we will keep seeing more of that when the 600 series is released. This way BOTH companies profit.chizow - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
Not sure what you're referring to, Nvidia launched GTX 570/580 before AMD launched the 6-series.And no Nvidia didn't raise prices on their 470/480 at the time which were at the same price points even though the 500 series extended that lead.
AMD priced the 6000 series accordingly, and I don't recall anyone complaining other than being disappointed it didn't offer more performance.
SlyNine - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
5870 user here. What everyone defending the 7xxx node change doesn't consider that most of us dissopointed in SI are compairing it to other fab shrinks.Iketh - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
You're on nvidia's payroll. Get off this site.sseemaku - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
Are engineers in nvidia thinking in the same way and not releasing their cards! Good for AMD.medi01 - Monday, March 5, 2012 - link
7850 outperforms 570 while costing 80$ less.nFanboi much?