AMD Radeon HD 7870 And 7850 Review: Pitcairn Gets Benchmarked

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

There's a big hole in between AMD's $450 Radeon HD 7950 and its $160 Radeon HD 7700. Today, the company introduces Radeon HD 7850 and 7870 to fill that gap, and they push a lot more performance than we expected. But are they really ready for prime time?

Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft

The Radeon HD 7800s don’t do particularly well in World of Warcraft, finishing behind their respective predecessors, albeit just slightly. More importantly, they succumb to the comparable GeForce cards they’ve been matching pace with up until now.

The finishing order is the same with 8x AA applied. With that in mind, all of the Radeon cards average more than 60 frames per second at both resolutions, yielding playable performance.

Finally, we have to mention that the Radeon HD 7850 crashed over and over during testing, requiring far too many reboots before we were finally able to capture useable benchmark results.

Don Woligroski
172 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hardcore_gamer
    Wow..7870 has nearly half the power-draw of GTX 570 and performs better . IMO this is the most impressive card in GCN line up so far.
    Reply
  • ilysaml
    Watch the benches well, the HD 7870 almost beating the GTX 580.
    Reply
  • alex3064
    what date is this 7850/7870 actually launched
    Reply
  • esrever
    AMD saved the best for last it seems. Although a bit over priced, these cards are amazing performance/watt with all the new features. Nice to see the 7870 take a few blows at the 580 in a few games. Can't wait to see what kepler can do as well!
    Reply
  • alex3064
    alex3064what date is this 7850/7870 actually launchedi mean when will it be launched in market
    Reply
  • theuniquegamer
    impressive performance of 7870 (i was disappointed by the 7770's performance )And what about microshuttering? Is it present in 7870 CF?
    Reply
  • hardcore_gamer
    ilysamlWatch the benches well, the HD 7870 almost beating the GTX 580.
    Looking at the performance graphs, 7870 performs very close to 7950 which has 40% more SPs and a 384 bit memory interface. I think AMD reduced the performance of 79xx series on purpose so that they can release a better card just before the launch of Kepler.
    Reply
  • _Pez_
    the 7870 is quite impressive. O.O almost the same gaming capability of the 580 for 350. OMG!
    Reply
  • hardcore_gamer
    alex3064i mean when will it be launched in market
    It is there in the first page. "you won’t be able to buy the card until at least March 19th, AMD tells us."
    Reply
  • Onikage
    7870 is a sensational card !!! even at this given price!!!
    what a card !!!
    DAY 1 BUY !
    Reply