AMD Radeon HD 7870 And 7850 Review: Pitcairn Gets Benchmarked

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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
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Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.