AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review: Graphics Core Next At $150
After a long and lonely reign, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 Ti is finally being challenged at the $150 price point. Does AMD's Bonaire-based Radeon HD 7790 offer enough performance to put up a fight, or is its familiar GCN architecture too little, too late?
Results: Borderlands 2
We begin with Borderlands 2, a game with unique cell-shaded art that we're running at its highest detail settings (and with PhysX set to Low; we can't turn it off entirely).
The Radeon HD 7790 looks fairly evenly matched against Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 Ti. It's slightly slower than the previous-generation Radeon HD 6870 and GeForce GTX 560. However, the Radeon HD 7850 1 GB has little trouble dominating our sub-$200 sampling. It's only a shame we aren't expecting it to persist in this form for long.
As you can see, none of the contenders drop below 40 FPS. The data suggests, then, that game play is smooth on each of the boards we're testing.
All of the frame time variances are extremely low. Even the "worst" result is under 5 ms, which is imperceptible while you're gaming.
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johnsonjohnson I thought the HD 7850 1GB is good value at $150 after rebate and 2GB at $180 after rebate.Reply -
mayankleoboy1 Its crazy to see how much performance you can get in $150. The HD7790 performs 90% of the 6870, which menas its almost equal to a HD5870 :O , which was the top chip a few years back.Reply -
Nintendo Maniac 64 Too bad the OpenGL benches weren't implemented before Tom's did that "Gaming on workstation GPUs" article...Reply -
amdfangirl I guess I know what my next GPU will be.Reply
6870 performance in a 85W envelope is amazing.
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rdc85 It really strong rival for 650Ti....Reply
Glad to see some competition at entry/budget level card..... -
vmem wow, nice job AMD...Reply
and perhaps they finally realized that they make crappy reference coolers at best and just let Sapphire go ahead and ship to Tom's lol. In all honesty, as an AMD exclusive partner, Sapphire should just go ahead and take over reference cooler design for AMD, they make some awesome stuff -
blazorthon amdfangirlI guess I know what my next GPU will be. 85W TDP... basically = to a HD 5870... I can't believe it...I'll get the 2GB and finally be able to play Skyrim 1080p w/high res textures xD.Reply
IDK about it at that point. High-res stuff and all that can eat through poor memory bandwidth cards such as this quite easily. -
vmem amdfangirlI guess I know what my next GPU will be. 85W TDP... basically = to a HD 5870... I can't believe it...I'll get the 2GB and finally be able to play Skyrim 1080p w/high res textures xD.Reply
Honestly, if you put on enough high res mods, even my 7970 barely keeps up... still a gorgeous game tho, and you'll enjoy it just fine with a little tweaking and a 7790 -
blazorthon Well, it seems to not hold up quite to the 90% of a 7850 rumors, but it's at a respectable ~80% of it on average. For $150, that is definitely a great competitor.Reply