HIS Radeon HD 7870 IceQ Turbo 2GB

Written by Steven Iglesias-Hearst

Monday, 26 March 2012

Table of Contents: Page Index
HIS Radeon HD 7870 IceQ Turbo 2GB
Closer Look: HIS Radeon HD7870
HIS IceQ Turbo Detailed Features
Features and Specifications
VGA Testing Methodology
DX10: 3DMark Vantage
DX10: Street Fighter IV
DX11: Aliens vs Predator
DX11: Battlefield Bad Company 2
DX11: BattleField 3
DX11: Lost Planet 2
DX11: Tom Clancy's HAWX 2
DX11: Metro 2033
DX11: Unigine Heaven 2.1
HIS HD7870 IceQ Turbo Temperatures
VGA Power Consumption
HIS HD7870 IceQ Turbo Overclocking
Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Page 9 of 18

DX11: Battlefield Bad Company 2

The Battlefield franchise has been known to demand a lot from PC graphics hardware. DICE (Digital Illusions CE) has incorporated their Frostbite-1.5 game engine with Destruction-2.0 feature set with Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 features destructible environments using Frostbit Destruction-2.0, and adds gravitational bullet drop effects for projectiles shot from weapons at a long distance. The Frostbite-1.5 game engine used on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 consists of DirectX-10 primary graphics, with improved performance and softened dynamic shadows added for DirectX-11 users.

At the time Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was published, DICE was also working on the Frostbite-2.0 game engine. This upcoming engine will include native support for DirectX-10.1 and DirectX-11, as well as parallelized processing support for 2-8 parallel threads. This will improve performance for users with an Intel Core-i7 processor. Unfortunately, the Extreme Edition Intel Core i7-980X six-core CPU with twelve threads will not see full utilization.

In our benchmark tests of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the first three minutes of action in the single-player raft night scene are captured with FRAPS. Relative to the online multiplayer action, these frame rate results are nearly identical to daytime maps with the same video settings. The Frostbite-1.5 game engine in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 appears to equalize our test set of video cards, and despite AMD's sponsorship of the game it still plays well using any brand of graphics card.

BattleField: Bad Company 2
- Extreme Settings: (Highest Quality, HBAO, 8x AA, 16x AF, 180s Fraps Single-Player Intro Scene)

Cost Analysis: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (1680x1050)

$379.99 AMD Radeon HIS HD7870 IceQ Turbo costs $4.30 per FPS

$139.99 NVIDIA GeForce Gigabyte GTX 460 OC costs $2.52 per FPS

$199.99 AMD Radeon HIS HD6870 X Turbo X costs $2.88 per FPS

$249.99 AMD Radeon HD6950 costs $3.40 per FPS

$249.99 NVIDIA GeForce MSI GTX 560Ti Hawk costs $2.70 per FPS

$289.99 AMD Radeon HIS HD6950 X Turbo X costs $3.76 per FPS

Video Card Test Products

Graphics Card	Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 OC	HIS Radeon HD6870 X Turbo X	Radeon HD6950	MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti Hawk	HIS Radeon HD6950 X Turbo X	HIS Radeon HD7870 IceQ Turbo
GPU Cores	336	1120	1408	384	1408	1280
Core Clock (MHz)	715	975	800	950	880	1100
Shader Clock (MHz)	1430	N/A	N/A	1900	N/A	N/A
Memory Clock (MHz)	900	1150	1250	1050	1300	1200
Memory Amount	1024MB GDDR5	1024MB GDDR5	2048MB GDDR5	1024MB GDDR5	2048MB GDDR5	2048MB GDDR5
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit

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Comments

# RE: HIS Radeon HD 7870 IceQ Turbo 2GB — Chris 2012-03-26 21:43

It seems that now is a good time to wait.

Right now, the price to performance ratio of the latest 7000s is just ... uncompetitive, even when you stack them up against the 560Tis, 6870s, and other mid-range chips of the last generation.

The 7970 appears to have been released with dethroning the 580GTX 3gb in mind - similar price point, but somewhat better performance.

With the 680 GTX now out and the expected lower end models, it seems that waiting is the way to go. AMD and their partners will inevitably be making some price cuts. Plus, sooner or later, the custom AIB boards will come out for Nvidia in this generation.

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