Nah, still too high.

Best case:

HD 7870 = GTX 570 / HD 6970

HD 7850 = in between GTX 560 Ti and HD 6950, or more accurately HD 5870

That's my best guess for now, and now I'm betting on it.

If you were expecting exact replacements for the 6800 series, prepare to be disappointed. The new Radeon HD 7850 is the one priced at $249; its big brother, the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition, costs a more burdensome $349. That means today's launch leaves the $199 price point conspicuously devoid of next-generation GPUs. Perhaps that will change in the future—possibly after the arrival of Kepler parts from Nvidia, which are rumored to be coming soon—but for now, we might say the hole in AMD's lineup is only partially plugged.

Also, it turns out AMD has revived that beloved, time-honored tradition known as the soft launch. In the company's words, today marks the lifting of the "preview NDA" (or preview non-disclosure agreement). We can tell you everything we know about these cards and post our performance findings, but actual products aren't due out in volume until two weeks from now, on March 19.

The Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and Radeon HD 7850 are plainly more desirable than the old Radeon HD 6970 and 6950. They're not only faster for the money, as the plots above show. They also have substantially lower power consumption and, if our experience with the 7870 is any indication, obscene amounts of overclocking headroom.

I'd say the two new Radeons are also better options than the comparable GeForces. It's true the GeForce GTX 560 Ti we tested isn't one of the highest-clocked models, but the Radeon HD 7850 is so much faster, I doubt a clock speed increase for the GeForce would bridge the gap. The Nvidia parts also had more trouble maintaining consistently low frame times in the games we tested, a fact that's reflected in our 99th percentile FPS per dollar plot.

And, again, the Radeons are way more power-efficient.

Those are all remarkable achievements, but they're diminished by AMD's somewhat conservative pricing. The key thing to note is that Pitcairn is considerably smaller than the GPUs inside the Radeon HD 6900 and GeForce GTX 560 series. In fact, it's even smaller than Barts, a chip that powers Radeon HD 6800-series cards priced as low as $140. It seems like a given that the Radeon HD 7850 will find its way south of the $200 mark eventually, and that is a truly exciting prospect. Heck, we may even be treated to a price war once Nvidia's 28-nm Kepler GPUs come out. If that happens, AMD clearly has plenty of ammunition.

As excellent as these new Radeons are, I'm a little bit disappointed by AMD's choice of cooler for the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition. (We can't really comment on the 7850, since our sample wasn't representative of retail offerings.) Considering the Pitcairn GPU's modest power requirements, I'd have liked AMD to tune its reference cooler for lower noise levels.

The 7870 and 7850 are the first (and currently only) decently priced 28nm GPU's from AMD. The hd7870 consistently nips at gtx580's heels (occasionally faster) is always faster than the hd6970.