Reviews - AMD Radeon HD 7850 vs 6850 vs 5850 at same clocks

[HEXUS]

Three generations of Radeons at the same clocks. Who wins?

Read more.

[Lucio]

...However, playing the game on this card provides a smoother games-playing experience that's hard to quantify....

No it's not hard to quantify, just chart the framerate over the same 2-5 minute period of gameplay and watch for differences when the charts are overlayed. The smoother gameplay will translate to less lag spikes, and a higher average framerate over the period of time

[Kumagawa]

The 6850 uses VLIW5 like the 5850 not VLIW4 which is only used by the 6950/70 cards.

[Phage]

No it's not hard to quantify, just chart the framerate over the same 2-5 minute period of gameplay and watch for differences when the charts are overlayed. The smoother gameplay will translate to less lag spikes, and a higher average framerate over the period of time

^^This.
Pardon a link to a competitor - but these charts can be very useful. After the Hexus 'Trusty Tables' of course !
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?im...lfNl8yX2wuanBn

[kalniel]

Or TechReports measurements :

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22573/6

Anyhow, really nice feature, thanks Hexus.

[manocheese]

Nice to see some extra evidence that I made the right choice. I've just spent £100 on a second 5850 for my system and it appears that I'll need to upgrade from a my old Core2 system to fully take advantage. I think I'll be waiting until the Ivy Bridge stuff is released, I think it would be silly to buy a Sandy Bridge now.

[ZSTom]

Good article; very interesting!

The results show how much efficiency has improved. Performance between HD 5850 and HD 7850 is fairly close (in most cases, perhaps) at 1080p, but the HD 7850 is achieving that performance while being smaller and consuming less power. I guess that was to be expected (what else would 'progress' be for technology?) but it's very interesting to see analysed, all the same.

Further comparisons while keeping other variables equal (TDP, die size, etc.) would be interesting too, if they were actually possible. They wouldn't necessarily prove anything that this article doesn't already, but would be interesting none the less.

[flearider]

how can you put the 5850 in the same test as those 2 cards ??? after the 5800 series of cards amd did the split .. 68** and 69**, 78** /79** 5850 and 5870 were the top end cards and should still be kicking second tier ass ....

[kalniel]

how can you put the 5850 in the same test as those 2 cards ??? after the 5800 series of cards amd did the split .. 68** and 69**, 78** /79** 5850 and 5870 were the top end cards and should still be kicking second tier ass ....

It's not as simple as that. You could argue AMD created a new tier above the 800 series - certainly they will argue that, hence the naming. Otherwise the tier below is the 700 series, which we know AMD carried forward with the 6700 and 7700 series. So where would you put the 6800 and 7800 series?

[flearider]

It's not as simple as that. You could argue AMD created a new tier above the 800 series - certainly they will argue that, hence the naming. Otherwise the tier below is the 700 series, which we know AMD carried forward with the 6700 and 7700 series. So where would you put the 6800 and 7800 series?

there the cheap tier 2 product hence the price on them .. 5850/5870 £250/£325 not hard to see ..with the 69/79 they could drive up the price on high end cards ..by filling in lower end cards ...
and the 700's well you have to have some were to put your rejected chips ..
after the 5800's they started to play the nvidia game thow everything at the market no price point untouched ..

[cheesemp]

Its interesting to see how cards are moving forward nowadays. I had a 4850 and that coped at 1680 x1050 really well even on modern games (COD-BO). I've since replaced it with a 285GTX (freebie!) and that copes with BF3 at 1080p at medium/high settings absolutely fine despite being 4 generations old. I can remember when just being a generation or two behind put you in serious trouble running the blockbusters but not any more it seems. I guess the rate of change has just slowed - I wonder if thats consoles having an influence??

[ZSTom]

My own opinion on it is that it comes down to launch prices, not names or model numbers. In the years that I've been buying GPUs the pricing of high-end cards hasn't exactly reduced, and the low-end is about the same, too. So when determining comparable cards, such as what was mid-range now and what was mid-range [x] years ago, price seems appropriate. For example, let's put a hard figure for mid-range at $250; it would make sense to me that a card costing $250 five years ago can be appropriately compared to one costing the same amount today when analysing progress.

You could argue inflation, though, I guess. And factors such as AMD not having much competition from NVIDIA right now (and hence resulting in higher-than-otherwise launch prices) doesn't make things any simpler.

[Mutley]

As an owner of a 5850, I'm very gratified to see this. It overclocks nicely, and I can have it running at 860Mhz and higher memory (don't recall what), although it has to be over-volted (all straightforward thanks to the MSI Afterburner tool).

My screen runs at 1650x1080, so it isn't a very high resolution and that helps.

[ZSTom]

Its interesting to see how cards are moving forward nowadays. I had a 4850 and that coped at 1680 x1050 really well even on modern games (COD-BO). I've since replaced it with a 285GTX (freebie!) and that copes with BF3 at 1080p at medium/high settings absolutely fine despite being 4 generations old. I can remember when just being a generation or two behind put you in serious trouble running the blockbusters but not any more it seems. I guess the rate of change has just slowed - I wonder if thats consoles having an influence??

I'm still using a HD 4850 512MB! And playing modern games at 1080p, to boot. Granted, I can only use medium settings, but the card can handle itself well enough and the games still look pretty.

Having said that, I'm planning to upgrade to a HD 7850 soon after they're released. The ol' HD 4850's 512MB VRAM is too limiting for 1080p gaming (I want to be able to play on high/max settings again).

[Mutley]

Isn't there a problem though with larger amounts of VRAM in that it pokes a large whole in the available system RAM?

[blueball]

Isn't there a problem though with larger amounts of VRAM in that it pokes a large whole in the available system RAM?

Not on a 64bit system. 32bit with 4Gb ram you would start to get issues