Mid-Range AMD Graphics Card Round-Up (HIS 7770 GHz / HIS 7850 / Sapphire 7850)

3DMark is Futuremark's latest benchmark. It can be used to benchmark and compare everything from mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablets and laptops, to high-end gaming systems. The benchmark is available for Windows, Windows RT Android and iOS.

With 3 separate tests, each of which is intended to be used alongside a specific classification of hardware, 3DMark is a very versatile benchmark. Ice Storm is intended to be used with mobile devices, Cloud Gate is good for use with laptops and home PCs, and Fire Strike can be used to push the performance of gaming PCs.

We used the ‘Fire Strike' benchmark which is designed to be used on gaming PCs. We opted for the Normal setting, NOT the Extreme mode.

3DMark gives Sapphire's 1GB 7850 Dual-X a straight set of victories in Futuremark's testing suite, although none of them with a greater performance difference than 1.3%. We were a little surprised by this, but numerous retests confirmed our findings.

This performance benefit may be related to a lower latency for Sapphire's 1 gigabyte of VRAM, in comparison to the HIS 7850 IceQ's 2 gigabytes. The most probable reason for the performance difference of 0.9-1.3% is the accuracy and systematic errors of Futuremark's benchmarks. Errors are inevitable occurrences with any and every piece of testing equipment, so that isn't to say that the 3DMark benchmarks are inaccurate; they are not.

The 7770 IceQ X Turbo slips off the 6870's pace a little when contesting 3DMark's demanding Fire Strike benchmark. The 7770 IceQ X Turbo's performance deficit is 6.3%.

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