How does 7850 compare to 5850, clock for clock?

[Jaydip]

That was a mistake from my side 😉 I calculated from 100 instead of 66.

 

[3DVagabond]

That was a mistake from my side 😉 I calculated from 100 instead of 66.

Sorry, I read your post and responded before I saw you'd already had it pointed out. Wasn't trying to pig pile on you. 🙂

 

[Jaydip]

No problemo 😉

 

[aaksheytalwar]

*Actually, if I'm doing my math right, at 1080 it's [(85-66)/66] ~29% faster. That's stock! The 7850 will O/C so much more than the 5850 and scale better while it's doing it. It's not even close, really.




*That's using TPU's benchmark suite. YMMV. It's best to look at particular games the OP plays for a more accurate picture.

This. I have done this for many games and an overclocked 7850 is at least 40-60% faster in cases where this is little to no tesselation, than an overclocked 5850. In rare cases it is 80-100%+ faster.

 

[Haserath]

The 7850 is okish… but it's not much of an upgrade from the 5850. 50% is not very 'feelable' when upping settings or even at the same settings. The 7850 is the best price/performance from AMD this generation even after the price cuts(with the games it's close), but it's still not the best.

To really feel an improvement, I'd recommend the 7950. To have an upgrade that's the best Price/performance for this gen(right now), I recommend the 7850.

If you aren't in too much of a hurry, Nvidia may come out with some cards that'll bring pricing down. Don't know when though.

I don't know how many times I have to say it but AGAIN I expect a decent increase in performance at around the SAME price point from a next gen card.

So... if the cost to make a chip at the same size goes up or they lose other revenue/profit by having to cut out other parts from their graphics lineup, you say they should keep the prices the same?

Way to run the business into the ground. AMD is doing a swell enough job of that already.:thumbsup:

Performance gains have slowed down thanks to the shrink coming later than usual. This will most likely be happening more and more. Get used to 2 generations on one node where the first gen will bring some performance and power savings and the second bring some more performance.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

If 50% isn't an upgrade then nobody would have upgraded from a 5850 to 6970, leave alone from a 5870 to 6970. 😛

IMO 5870 to 6970 makes no sense. But 5850 to 6970 or 5870 to 580 is a good enough upgrade for a 1 year gap 🙂

 

[Haserath]

I didn't say it wasn't an upgrade. I just don't think anything below +100% is much of an upgrade.

This is coming from a guy that went from a x800(don't know which model but not high end), to a GTX 280(which died on me twice, wish I went with the card I wanted instead of the recommended brand by the computer geek/fanboy building it for me(my brother:sneaky🙂), to finally arrive at a 6950.

Heck, I would still be rolling the 280 if it worked.🙁

 

[Silverforce11]

As a 5850 user for a long long time, it is a worthwhile upgrade only IF you are an overclocker. The performance of OC 7850 is stellar for the price and thermals/power use. The biggest difference is the performance is high in pretty much every game, whereas 58xx suffers in most NV sponsored titles. That and minimum fps improved a lot, not sure if its the extra vram or just the GCN architecture.

I was about to jump on for a gtx680 but over here they are priced ~$700 USD and my logic prevailed; no way would I folk out that much for what is essentially a mid-range GPU product.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

100% assured gain in every game is to much to expect in one generation. 5850 was a high end card. You should compare it to 7950 if you want to count 2 generations. 7850 is like 1-1.5 generations, not 2 generations because 7850 isn't high end. Going from a 5850 oc to 7950 oc > 100% improvement for most new games.

If the 680 is mid range then so was the 480 when it was released. It was barely faster than 5870 (older gen but from AMD team) in games of that time, mostly not more than 10% or so. 680 is still 40%+ faster than 580 once both are overclocked.

 

[Silverforce11]

A lot of people forget that 58xx and 69xx series are high-end being sold for mid-range prices.

Currently its the reverse, mid-range products sold at ridiculous prices because TSMC drop the ball with 28nm production.

 

[Arkaign]

Thanks to AMD's naming re-shift that they did with the 6xxx series, the 78xx is the midrange series, 79xx the high end. As opposed to the 57xx being midrange, and 58xx being high end.

 

[railven]

Hey, what are your specs, BTW? 😉

I tried setting up a sig once (and it looked awful) and I've yet to redo it:

Mine:
HD 7970 @ 1125/1575
i5 2500K stock (need to OC this bad boy)
ASRock Z68 Gen3 Extreme4 (or is it Gen4 Extreme 3 - dyslexia 🙁 )
2x4GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600
Corsair TX850
ASUS 1080p 120hz/ Samsung 1080p 60hz
Corsair Cabride 500R White/Black

Her:
GTX 680 +75 offset
i7 930 @ 3.6ghz with Corsair H50
ASRock X58 Extreme
3x2GB G.Skill Black Pi DDR3 1600
Corsair GX650
ASUS 1080p 60hz
Cooler Master Scout

I think those are the important things?

And I agree that on certain games, the new cards are much better than the 5-series. That's the tessellation effect. No doubt they are much better cards, even where a TechPowerUp performance summary would suggest otherwise: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7850_HD_7870/26.html

But outside of a few current games, a 7850, and in my opinion even a 7870, is not a reasonable upgrade from a 5850/5870.

Batman:AC alone to me is a huge perk to my upgrade. Amazed how much they fixed their tesselators.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Nope, they aren't mid range. They are high end being sold for the right prices. 5850 and 6900 were heavily discounted, they were high end but cheap. These new cards are high. If they can be overclocked so high that the assured performance increase is 50%+ compared to previous flagship when comparing both overclocked, then they are high end and not even performance class

An Oced 7970 is about 50-80% faster than an Oced 6970, on an average 60-70%. It blows away 6950 cf as a setup, where fps is just a part and not the whole, is surprisingly close to a 6990 or 6970 cf within 10-20% performance in most cases once overclocked, and is far smoother because of this and a much better package at a lower price than 6990 or 6970 cf although it is an overall better solution with 90% of the performance and often even faster in fps terms

The gtx 680 oc is about 40-50% faster than a gtx 580 oc and sometimes even faster and it trades blows with a 590 making ven an overclocked 590 pointless.

And these cards are cheaper than these dual gpu cards

And from jan 2012 for at least another 8-10 months there won't be any better single card and amd won't release another big upgrade this year. Nearing q4 nvidia will release a card which will be nvidias main card or near main card for whole of 2013 and it will be just 20-25% faster but will need to compete with 8970 not 7970.

I see no reason to complain. From radeon 9000 to x2900 high end cards were always $500+ and usually just 20-50% faster than the previous flagship.

9700 pro to 9800 pro
X1900 to x2900

Only rarely do 60%-100% better cards come and 7970 comes close to that because Oced 7970 is at least 60% faster than Oced 6970 and previously we didn't have such overclock able nor scalable cards, 7000 series is the first.

And as for pricing, you can't amd to undersell themselves for life. They are now charging what they are worth, previously they were charging less than their worth

 

[Silverforce11]

The gtx 680 oc is about 40-50% faster than a gtx 580 oc and sometimes even faster and it trades blows with a 590 making ven an overclocked 590 pointless.

Just no.

A "stock" gtx680 is 20-25% faster than a stock 580. Even be more generous and remove a few games, and lets say its 35% faster.

Let's be generous and give both cards a 20% OC, it doesn't change anything because both scale just as much. The gap is still the same. "Sometimes it trades blows" does not equate to overall performance, there are outliers in either direction, one must not cherry pick. No way is its overall OC vs OC performance 40-50%.

It's still a mid-range product, small die size, low TDP. You can claim its an enthusiast product because of its price, but for a full node shrink generation leap, getting 20-25% better performance over previous gen high-end != high-end.

 

[Termie]

As a 5850 user for a long long time, it is a worthwhile upgrade only IF you are an overclocker. The performance of OC 7850 is stellar for the price and thermals/power use. The biggest difference is the performance is high in pretty much every game, whereas 58xx suffers in most NV sponsored titles. That and minimum fps improved a lot, not sure if its the extra vram or just the GCN architecture.

I was about to jump on for a gtx680 but over here they are priced ~$700 USD and my logic prevailed; no way would I folk out that much for what is essentially a mid-range GPU product.

This is really good insight, because it's coming from someone who maxed the OC on their 5850 and now maxed the OC on a 7850. Can you say what percentage increase you got? And of course I'm quite interested in how it compares to your old 5850 crossfire setup. In absolute terms I'm sure it's slower, but does it play better?

I tried setting up a sig once (and it looked awful) and I've yet to redo it:

Mine:
HD 7970 @ 1125/1575
i5 2500K stock (need to OC this bad boy)
ASRock Z68 Gen3 Extreme4 (or is it Gen4 Extreme 3 - dyslexia 🙁 )
2x4GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600
Corsair TX850
ASUS 1080p 120hz/ Samsung 1080p 60hz
Corsair Cabride 500R White/Black

Her:
GTX 680 +75 offset
i7 930 @ 3.6ghz with Corsair H50
ASRock X58 Extreme
3x2GB G.Skill Black Pi DDR3 1600
Corsair GX650
ASUS 1080p 60hz
Cooler Master Scout

I think those are the important things?



Batman:AC alone to me is a huge perk to my upgrade. Amazed how much they fixed their tesselators.

LOL, I think it's Extreme 4 Gen 3! 😉

By the way, why not just copy a format you like from someone else's sig and paste in your specs? One tip is that you can use the size command to make it smaller - just put the word "size" in brackets like this [size=1 (or 2 or 3 or 4...)], and then end the sig with [/size].

 

[aaksheytalwar]

never mind

 

[StinkyPinky]

I went from an lightly overclocked 5850 to a lightly overclocked 7870 and I'm happy with the difference. :thumbsup: