AMD Completes Its GCN Lineup With Impressive Mid-Range 7850/7870 Cards

From DailyTech: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) today pushed out yet another graphics processing unit design. This hard launch means that the chipmaker has produced 3 launches in the last 3 months -- an alacritous release pace, to be certain.

There are plenty of pressing questions surrounding the latest launch -- the 78xx series. How does it perform? Does it suffer the same overpricing issues as its most recent Southern Islands predecessor?

But for a moment AMD's critics and proponents alike should pause and appreciate the solid launch it has put together at the 28 nm node.

With the latest addition Southern Islands -- the lineup that introduced AMD's new GPU-computing-friendly "Graphics Core Next" architecture -- finally feels like a true family. And there's a nice symmetry to the offerings. If you take the Radeon HD 7750, 7850, and 7950, each step bumps the core count by a factor of two; likewise for the Radeon HD 7770, 7870, and 7970. For those interested, the '50 cards are dubbed "Pro" in their extended code-names, while the '70 cards are dubbed XT.

Pricing is also rather periodic, with each model towards the higher end commanding an extra $100 USD. The family members, from Radeon HD 7750 to Radeon HD 7970, are priced at $109, $159, $250, $350, $450, $550.

The $250 USD Radeon HD 7850 falls somewhere between rival NVIDIA Corp.'s (NVDA) GeForce GTX 560 Ti and Geforce GTX 570 in price. The GTX 560 Ti is currently $200 USD at best, while the GeForce GTX 570 can be found for $305 USD. Price-wise, the card is closest to NVIDIA's lesser known GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores, a GPU computing-centric card with 14 SMPs, which retails for $270 USD.

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