All to true, it wasn't until I played metro 2033 and Crysis 2 that I realised that my overclock of 1250mhz was far to much for the summer time ( Card would thermal throttle and I'd get stuttering) so I backed down to 1.100mv and 1150 mhz ( still fast!) and lost 20 degrees enabling me to play without epic stutter
My 7850 completely outguns my last card*, a hd 6970 that had a pretty high OC
* In direct x 11 games I can get up to a 50% performance increase over the 6970, in other games such as GTA I went from stuttery 25 fps average to a far more tolerable 33 fps average.