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: Crysis 2

Crysis 2 launched as a DirectX 9 game, but DirectX 11 support was added later through a patch. We like to run both code paths to compare performance.

Interestingly, we’ve seen great frame rates from the Radeon HD 7000-series cards using DirectX 11. Conversely, the new architecture seems to absolutely tank faced with DirectX 9.

AMD’s Catalyst 12.3 beta driver seems to fix the performance problems in Crysis 2 with DirectX 9. The new cards demonstrate much better frame rates.

Nvidia’s GeForce cards generally outperform competing AMD boards, but the finishing order is tight.

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.