AMD has just announced its new Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7850 graphics cards. The overall performance is very good, and we were particularly impressed by how well the Radeon HD 7870 performs in games like BattleField 3: it matches NVIDIA’s GTX 580, but does so at a much lower price point (rumored $250 vs. $450).
In terms of power consumption, both AMD Radeon HD 7800-Series do very well too. In independent tests, they have been shown to consume up to 30% less than the NVIDIA GTX 580, which is definitely not too shabby, and that translate into cooler, less noisy computers as well. This is certainly a feature that will pay off for mobile computers, although everyone loves power efficiency in any shape and form.
At this point, we could not find any cards on the market, so it’s fair to say that this is a paper launch. However, the prospect of getting one of those for about ($250) is quite appealing for the serious gamer. On the other hand, we know that NVIDIA’s next architecture (codename Kepler) is almost out of the door, and leaked internal documents already hint at a 70% to 100% performance boost, which will probably command a price premium. This is undoubtedly the kind of first-world problem that gamers will have to face in the next few weeks.
In any case, AMD’s new graphics processors are impressive, and we hope that it will land in store very soon, with stable and mature drivers. This may just be what you were waiting for, at the price that you want it at.
Filed in . Read more about AMD, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and Radeon.