No official in-depth reviews of Radeon HD 7850M equipped laptops, but we can say it will be probably around the GTX 660M performance and probably won’t surpass it. Why?
Well, the Radeon HD 7850M is the same as the Radeon 7770M desktop part, but having 67.5% of its core clock and 1000MHZ (GDDR5) memory clock instead of 1125MHZ. Everything else is similar. That means two things:
- The 7850M might have very good OC capabilities.
- The Radeon 7850M performace is something like the GTX 660M performance level. Here’s the explaination – a bit long but take a breath and check it out.
- 7850M -> 67.5% Radeon 7770. The 7850M has about 67.5% of the performance of the Radeon HD 7770 (desktop).
- 7770 -> 90%-100% 6850. The Radeon HD 7770 (desktop) is an annoying GPU that offers about 90%-100% of the Radeon HD 6850 – in many cases close to 100% (1, 2).
- 6850 -> 115% 6970M. Now, the Radeon 6850 is a the same as the Radeon HD 6970M only with 775MHZ core clock instead of 680MHZ (about 87%-88%)
- 6970M ->125%-140% GTX 660M. The Radeon 6970M is about 20%-30% faster than the GTX 660M (1). When reading the benchmarks, keep in mind that the 660M is usually tested with faster cpu.
UPDATE: notebookcheck added a Radeon 7770 test. Results: The Radeon HD 7770 + I5-2400 (3.1GHZ) offers approximally 10-12% higher perfromance than 6970M+I7 (2.8GHZ for two cores) => when coupled with cpu clocked at the same rate as I5, the performance of the 6970M will be very close, probably 5%-10% less than the 7770 (desktop, again) => same conclusion, the Radeon HD 7850M and GTX 660M are very close to one another.
If you’ll do the numbers, you’ll come to the conclusion that the 7850M is something around the GTX 660M in approximation. But that’s just a rough approximation and you DO have to wait to reviews. I used these bridges because I tried to find relatively similar GPUs from different architectures to compare. I used the 7770 and 6850 comparisons which are very similar, then went from 6850 to 6970M because they are almost the same and then go back to the GCN core – 7850M.
Why do I write about it? because we start to see laptops, like the HP Envy 17 (good price if I may add), that are being shipped with the 7850M and you probably want to know what does it mean, gaming performance-wise.
Final word: It’s a GTX 660M direct competitor. Maybe a feature more.
Some nice guy uploaded Videos of the Envy 17 with the 7850M playing Dirt 3 and BF3 on Ultra settings שמג FullHD resolution (note: I don’t know if he uses AA and I don’t think these are the most graphically intense scene in those games):
Hi,
Thanks for this, this chipset is being used a lot now, also in the new “All-In-One” segment, which is about to get a huge boost thanks to Windows 8 and the Apple versions being a lot nicer. Doesn’t the new Apple thing use this chipset?
Simon
the new iMac?
The 7850M probably haven’t been really used because of the drivers problems (like in the 7970M) which are now fixed to a high degree.
The only laptop I’ve seen using it – the HP Envy 17 is now discontinued. I don’t know what they’ll do next.