Skyrim – HD7850, HD 7790, GTX 650 Ti, GTX 650 Ti BOOST

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (DirectX 9)


 

The Empire of Tamriel is on the edge. The High King of Skyrim has been murdered.

Alliances form as claims to the throne are made. In the midst of this conflict, a far more dangerous, ancient evil is awakened. Dragons, long lost to the passages of the Elder Scrolls, have returned to Tamriel.

The future of Skyrim, even the Empire itself, hangs in the balance as they wait for the prophesized Dragonborn to come; a hero born with the power of The Voice, and the only one who can stand amongst the dragons.

Frame Rating: GTX 660 vs HD 7870, plus HD 7790, HD 7850, GTX 650 Ti BOOST - Graphics Cards 41

Frame Rating: GTX 660 vs HD 7870, plus HD 7790, HD 7850, GTX 650 Ti BOOST - Graphics Cards 42

Frame Rating: GTX 660 vs HD 7870, plus HD 7790, HD 7850, GTX 650 Ti BOOST - Graphics Cards 43

Frame Rating: GTX 660 vs HD 7870, plus HD 7790, HD 7850, GTX 650 Ti BOOST - Graphics Cards 44

Our settings for Skyrim

Here is a video our testing run through, for your reference

No runt or drop issues with single GPUs, so the results only tell us about the relative performance of each GPU.  The GTX 650 Ti BOOST is the fastest cards for Skyrim at 1920×1080 followed by the HD 7850, the HD 7790 and finally the GTX 650 Ti.

Both the GTX 650 Ti and the HD 7790 are showing significant hitching and stutter issues compared to the HD 7850 and the newer GTX 650 Ti BOOST.

The average frame rate over the course of our run show the GTX 650 Ti BOOST and the HD 7850 nearly equal at 80 FPS or so with the HD 7790 hitting 51 FPS and the GTX 650 Ti just breaching 40 FPS.  Notice though that the GTX 650 Ti BOOST does separate a bit after the 65th percentile in favor of the NVIDIA card.

Clearly the frame time variance of the HD 7790 and the GTX 650 Ti are being adversely affected by the hitches and stutters we saw in our frame time plot.

 

The GTX 650 Ti BOOST and the HD 7850 appear to be pretty even again in performance and the HD 7790 and original GTX 650 Ti are pretty even but a solid jump down.

Ouch, if the hitches in our 1920×1080 testing were bad, the results here at 2560×1440 are much worse, in particular with the HD 7790.  Both the HD 7850 and the GTX 650 Ti BOOST are consistent with only a couple of spikes.

Both of our higher end cards makes Skyrim completely playable at 2560×1440, something we can't say for the two slower cards in our testing.

As it turns out both the HD 7790 and the GTX 650 Ti have much more frame variance than the HD 7850 and GTX 650 Ti BOOST.  This is the kind of interesting data that looking at average frame rates just can't provide!

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