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: OpenCL/GPGPU

GPGPU using OpenCL

A selection of applications optimized for OpenCL (rather than proprietary APIs) allows us to create comparable results.

LuxMark 2.0/LuxRender

Rendering is an ideal application for GPU-accelerated computing, and AMD’s GCN-based Radeon cards are well-known for their ability to perform well in such workloads. The Bonaire-based Radeon HD 7790 slides in right between the Radeon HD 7770 and 7850, just like AMD promises it should.

RatGPU

This renderer seems to favor Nvidia's hardware, and we see the GeForce cards rally. Once more, the Radeon HD 7790 places exactly where it should in AMD's line-up.

Bitmining

We're a little bit surprised to see the Radeon HD 7790 leading in this benchmark, outpacing even the 7850. We‘ll chalk this one up to Bonaire’s higher clock speeds.

GPU Caps - PostFX

This benchmark is based on what was originally source code from Nvidia’s SDK; it combines graphics and compute tasks in a unique way. The 3D scene is rendered using OpenGL, and the GPU also handles all of the post-processing via OpenCL. Once more, the Radeons place according to their model number hierarchy, while the GeForce cards trundle along behind.

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