AMD Radeon HD 7850

By refreshing almost its entire line of video cards before Nvidia releases a single new one this cycle, AMD has been zooming ahead of its competitor in an almost dizzying way. That momentum, which over the last two and a half months has carried the company through releases of cards on the high-high end (the Radeon HD 7970 and 7950), the high-medium end (the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition and the 7750), and the medium-high end (the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition), continues with the new Radeon HD 7850. This sibling to the 7870 in the "Pitcairn" family is positioned (with a price of $249 list) as a gateway card to get non-rich buyers excited about gaming, which much like the 7870 it manages to do with slightly less elbow room than every user might prefer.

Let's start with the incontrovertible positives, which comprise the innovations AMD has been introducing throughout the 7000 series. Foremost among these is a new architecture based on 28nm process technology: Graphics Core Next, which the company has designed to improve utilization, throughput, and multitasking by giving each compute unit the ability to execute instructions from multiple kernels at once. PowerTune intelligently monitors and adjusts energy usage on an application-by-application basis, whenever the proper electrical and thermal headroom are present. ZeroCore Power shuts down both the GPU and fan during long idle periods to reduce draw in that state by as much as 95 percent. If you have more than one card installed in a CrossFireX configuration, you benefit even more: All GPUs aside from the primary one remain in the ZeroCore Power state unless they're directly being used.

Then there's the expected collection of AMD features, technologies, and abilities, which are also found on every 7000-series card so far released. Support for DirectX 11, Eyefinity (for easily setting up and configuring multiple monitors, as many as six for the 7850), HD3D (AMD's stereoscopic 3D standard), DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 1.4, and PCI Express (PCIe) version 3.0. Like the 7870, it's obvious at sight that it's intended as a high-end card, as it's about 10.5 inches in length (on the long side, but short enough that it will fit into any gaming case worth its salt); has a wide enough fan?heat sink unit to block a second expansion slot when installed; and requires an additional connection from the power supply for sufficient juice (one six-pin PCIe connector; the 7870 needs two).

Spec-wise, the 7850 doesn't look too bad, either, especially when it's up against the 7870. Both cards have GPUs with about 2.8 billion transistors, 32 ROPs, 2GB of GDDR5 memory, a 1,200MHz memory clock, a memory data rate of 4.8Gbps, and memory bandwidth of 153.6GBps. Their TDPs are similar (175 watts for the 7870, 130 watts for the 7850). The bigger differences between the two are found in the engine clock (860MHz on the 7850, 1GHz on the 7870), the number of stream processors (1,024 for the 7850, 1,280 on the 7870, resulting in respective compute powers of 1.76 and 2.56 teraflops), and the number of texture units (64 versus 80).

The challenge the 7850 faces in terms of performance is similar to that of the 7870 as well. Despite costing $50-$60 more than its nearest Nvidia competitor (here the 2010 Nvidia GTX 560 Ti), it's seldom a categorically better performer. Oh, it outdoes the GTX 560 Ti at almost every turn at 1,920-by-1,200 resolution: 34.7 frames per second (fps) versus 30.6fps on Aliens vs. Predator, 50.7fps versus 48fps on DiRT 3, 104fps versus 101fps on HAWX 2 (a little unusual, as that's an Nvidia title), 24.2fps versus 18.8 on the Heaven Benchmark 2.5, and 40.8fps versus 32.5fps on Just Cause 2. But none of these victories is major. (And the GTX 560 Ti's sole win, Lost Planet 2, was even more razor thin: 35.4fps versus 35.2fps.) For a potential price differential as wide as exists between these two cards, we'd expect somewhat better results.

As is common with AMD's 7000 series, however, the 7850 makes up for it with its improved power usage. Our full system using the 7850 drew only about 97 watts while idling and about 180 under load; the same system, with a GTX 560 Ti installed instead, drew about 98 watts at idle and 216.3 watts under load. The fact remains that if saving money on your electricity is a big concern for you, an AMD card remains the only way to go. We'd love to see Nvidia at least catch up when its new cards come out.

As things stand, Nvidia has an edge with its pricing of the GTX 560 Ti, which undercuts the AMD Radeon HD 7850's performance superiority more than is perhaps ideal. Nvidia's hardware is a compelling argument for saving more than a few bucks if you think you can live without a few frames here and there. But if you're looking for the objectively better card for about $250, to say nothing of one that's smarter in terms of its power usage, you'll find it with the 7850 when it goes on sale in mid March.

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