AMD’s Pitcairn with 768 SPs in review: The chip that was unfortunately never allowed to exist as Radeon HD 7830 | Retro

1 - Introduction and Background Info 2 - Technical Data and Teardown 3 - Synthetic Benchmarks 4 - Metro 2033, AvP and Crysis 2 5 - Mafia II, GTA IV and Batman Arkam City 6 - DiRT3, Starcraft II and Battlefield 3 7 - Performance Index and Conclusion

Performance evaluation Overall performance

Cumulative frame rates are always a thing of their own, because in the end you will probably never be able to make a truly objective overall judgment that really takes all aspects into account. Drives change far too often over the course of a year for that, and test games are also subject to constant change due to patches. We can state that isolated performance drops are recorded in games like Mafia II, GTA IV, Starcraft II or even Batman Arkham City, but they are within the overall performance of comparable Radeon cards and have absolutely nothing to do with the chip’s test status.

In many other single benchmarks, the tested GPU is on par with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti and can even overtake it in some cases. However, the Radeon HD 6870 is always beaten (with two exceptions, Batman and Starcraft II), which the current Radeon HD 7770 never manages with the discontinued HD 6850 because it is simply too weak. As a conclusion, the review sample is always good when the HD 7850 is good as well – thus, it is almost a perfect scaling of the performance throughout.

Due to the fact that it is only an engineering sample, we will not make a final assessment on the power consumption in tabular form, but we can state that it ranks at least slightly below that of a “full” HD 7850. This is not a problem this time, as it was with the Radeon HD 5830, which was sometimes even worse than its slightly bigger sister HD 5850 in terms of consumption. So the all-clear can clearly be given here.

Summary

Good things are often so close that they are easily overlooked. In any case, we hope that AMD will reconsider this option and thus close a big gap in the portfolio. A card, often even on the performance level of a GeForce GTX 560 Ti, paired with the low power consumption just below a Radeon HD 7850 is guaranteed to sell like hot cakes. This engineering sample presented here has everything that a card in the price range of about 150-160 Euros has to have. If you can’t spend 200 Euros on a graphics card, but also can’t get used to the much lower performance level of the 100-Euro cards, you would have the best arguments to invest your money wisely here. When Nvidia will be able to offer new and thus more efficient cards than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti of the Fermi generation in this field is still well hidden in the stars.

What Nvidia can do with the GTX 560 Ti 448 cores should not be a hurdle for AMD. By the way, you could also do without 1 GB of graphics memory in the context of a possible cost optimization, because 1 GB GDDR5 should be enough for the targeted resolutions and the possible performance level. This card would definitely be a worthy replacement for the somewhat slower Radeon HD 6870, which has been EOL for quite some time.

Finally, we would like to point out that this is only an internally used sample for development purposes that was never intended for the end customer – which we regret just as much at this point. The market would be ripe for such a card, so please a little more courage AMD. Sometimes you have to force one or the other to be happy. I wish.So….?