To upgrade or not?

I've been digging through these benchmarks and my takeaway is that the 5850 is basically hovering near the 7850... though the 5770 in CF acts more like a 5870. Which would mean the 5870 actually edges out the 7850—purely on paper, anyway. In theory, the 5770 CF should perform like a 7850, but obviously, it won't even inside CF... unless you want to pay that extra $133 premium for the 3.8 GHz overclock. Honestly, the smartest move is probably just upgrading to hit maybe 50-60 FPS on medium settings in BF 4—if you're willing to ditch the ultra effects and AA...

I’d probably just grab a better GPU instead of messing around with CF... or maybe I wouldn't change anything at all.

Me too. I’ll always take one powerful graphics card over two weaker ones—and honestly, who knows how much of a headache two cards would actually be when you try to run games...

James Castillo8 said:I've been digging through these benchmarks and my takeaway is that the 5850 is basically hovering near the 7850... though the 5770 in CF acts more like a 5870. Which would mean the 5870 actually edges out the 7850—purely on paper, anyway. In theory, the 5770 CF should perform like a 7850, but obviously, it won't even inside CF... unless you want to pay that extra $133 premium for the 3.8 GHz overclock. Honestly, the smartest move is probably just upgrading to hit maybe 50-60 FPS on medium settings in BF 4—if you're willing to ditch the ultra effects and AA...

The HD 7850 actually holds about a 20% lead.

I guess I’d probably just grab an R7 260X 1GB for under $300:

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1078?vs=1044
http://www.bestbuy.com/product_info.php?products_id=14073

James Castillo8 said:I've been digging through these benchmarks and my takeaway is that the 5850 is basically hovering near the 7850... though the 5770 in CF acts more like a 5870. Which would mean the 5870 actually edges out the 7850—purely on paper, anyway. In theory, the 5770 CF should perform like a 7850, but obviously, it won't even inside CF... unless you want to pay that extra $133 premium for the 3.8 GHz overclock. Honestly, the smartest move is probably just upgrading to hit maybe 50-60 FPS on medium settings in BF 4—if you're willing to ditch the ultra effects and AA...

The 5870 isn't quite on par with the HD 7850. However, the HD 5970 is right on the heels of the HD 7950. Whoever picked up that card when it first launched certainly had themselves a good time... assuming they're even still using it today.