AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review: Graphics Core Next At $150

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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: Far Cry 3

Even with Crysis 3 out, Far Cry 3 remains a graphically-impressive title. It's demanding, and we've seen it surface as a problematic piece of software for GeForce and Radeon cards alike, making the game an interesting benchmark. We're opting for the High detail preset with HDAO enabled on AMD's cards and HBAO on Nvidia's.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti ties the Radeon HD 7790, while the Radeon HD 6870 and GeForce GTX 560 flank the top and bottom of that range. Only Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 falls below 30 FPS.

The details of GeForce GTX 650's struggle are more apparent when we look at frame rate over time. Other cards far better, though the Radeon HD 7850 tops these charts again.

Variance in frame times is higher on AMD's cards in this game. While ~10 ms is the worst result we've seen thus far, it's still not severe enough to create the stuttering we'd notice during game play.

Don Woligroski
129 Comments Comment from the forums
  • 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
  • nukemaster
    Very good performance for the price.

    Its a good time to build mid end systems :)
    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.

    6870 performance in a 85W envelope is amazing.
    Reply
  • rdc85
    It really strong rival for 650Ti....

    Glad to see some competition at entry/budget level card.....
    Reply
  • vmem
    wow, nice job AMD...

    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
    Reply
  • 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.
    IDK about it at that point. High-res stuff and all that can eat through poor memory bandwidth cards such as this quite easily.
    Reply
  • 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.
    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
    Reply
  • 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