Interestingly the reference card we've been testing will look completely different when the add-in board (AIB) manufacturers are done with it. That said we reckon there's probably a bit further you can push the Pitcairn Pro GPU, good news for those factory overclocked cards that are sure to follow. That's some impressive pixel-pusher grunt from a sub-£200 card, even if you do have to push it to the edge to make it really perform. At those speeds the AMD Radeon HD 7850 offers around the same sort of performance figures as the £50 more expensive Nvidia card. We quickly hit the artificial limits of the AMD Overdrive overclocking app, the GPU and memory sliders topping out at 1,050MHz and 1,450MHz respectively. Then you start waving around the magic overclocking wand and suddenly the GTX 560 Ti isn't the competition anymore, it's the Nvidia GTX 570. In the Metro 2033 benchmark, twice as fast. In both Heaven and Metro 2033 at 2560x1600 the AMD HD 7850 is the faster card.

There are a few cases where the HD 7850 takes the lead and that's thanks to the dual geometry engines making mincemeat of any tessellation road blocks games might throw up.

That's a price range to hit between £120 and £350 a rather wide, and GPU-packed expanse to fill with two cards.In straight performance terms the limited edition Nvidia GTX 560 Ti is a bit of a beast and just about has the edge over this new GCN-powered AMD card. The Radeon HD 7800 series, code-named Pitcairn after the wee south pacific island with a population of three rather mangy cows, a dachshund named Colin, and a small hen in its late forties, is meant to sit in the gap made by the Tahiti-class and Cape Verde-class cards. And typically not all of them are made by the competition. That's a very laudable position, but not something that's necessarily that new.Īt the top end of the graphics market the air is rarefied and there's not the wealth of competition there is around the same sort of price-points that exist lower down the GPU ladder.Īt the point where AMD is aiming the Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7850 there is already a host of enthusiast-class graphics cards they're going to have to do battle with. These are, according to AMD, the cards for gamers wanting to hit the highest graphics settings in-game without having to spend £300 on a GPU. This here represents the start of its enthusiast range of cards serious gaming starts here, according to AMD. But that ridiculous end of the graphics market is not what we're looking at with the AMD Radeon HD 7800.

Amd radeon hd 7800 series overclock