Hd 7770 vs hd 6850

It's very hard to say. Lately I've felt that the anandtech bench's are not as reliable due to not knowing what driver they were using but I would take this bench with a grain of salt. When looking at these 2 cards you need to realize that the 6850 is a mid tier card where as the 7770 is a entry level card so you are going to have more horse power out of the 6850 and newer tech in the 7770.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/540?vs=536

but wasnt the 7770 already close to 6850 when it was launched, so did the 12.11 driver increase the performance??

I'm not exactly sure I would have to find benchmarks with 12.11. Looks like the 7770 narrowly beats it I found benchmarks.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Catalyst_12.11_P...

They both are Pretty equal in performance.

seems they are the same

yea In some areas the 7770 pulls ahead but they pretty much are the same I guess the jump to the 7XXX series really helped.

and how does a gtx 460 256-bit compare against the 7770 and 6850,is it slower than both??

It performs very similar to the 7770 and the 6850 in some areas beats them but you lose the newer tech by going with the 460 versus the newer cards.

but i heard the that infact the gtx 460 1gb performs worse than the 6850 in higher resolution and that it was on par with 7770 at launch, so i guess its a bit slower than 7770/6850 right now,except for games prefering nvidia

That is correct at launch it was better I was basing based on launch results but as you can see as drivers mature things change.

they are pretty close, but overall i think the 6850 is slightly better going by reviews. the gtx460 is about the same also, really depends on the game. Probably just go with the 7770 as it uses less power. What system are you puting it in? what are the rest of the specs? You need a good brand 450w PSU for gtx460, the 6850 draws slightly les spower and the 7770 can get away with a lower end psu of 380w, also depending on how much power other components draw.

I can't honestly imagine that the 7770 is on par with the 6850- I know the clock speeds are faster, but it's a battle of a 128-bit card against a 256-bit card with only what, 225mhz core and 125mhz memory clock to make up the difference? That isn't even mentioning that the 6850 is known to OC fairly well from both my own experience and from what I've seen in benchmarks. I would wager the 7770 might be able to keep pace for lower-resolution scenarios and 2D rendering, but after that I think it's going to fall back.

I could always be wrong, but if I am, that makes the 7770 a heck of a steal considering the price-point of the 6850 after the same time on the market.

no, it is not about the bus interface or core clock, otherwise the 7770 should perform even less than the gtx 550ti 192-bit, and with the latest drivers you can well be sure that 7770 is equal if not better than the 6850 and the 7770 is a good overclocker if not better than 6850