Following a successful run with the codenamed R700 family of GPUs, which was originally released back in June 2008 as the Radeon Hard disk drive 4000 series, AMD is launching the highly anticipated R800. Debuting to no 1's surprise as the ATI Radeon Hard disk 5000 series, on our test bed today nosotros have a reference Hard disk drive 5870 graphics card packing some 2150 1000000 transistors and produced on a 40nm process.

The new Radeon Hard disk drive 5000 series is said to evangelize effectually 2x more than performance than previous generation Radeon cards, and brings DirectX 11 support to desktops for the first time. Even while Nvidia is downplaying the latter, AMD sees information technology as a great advantage and expects DX11-capable games to start aircraft earlier the end of the year.

Nvidia will as well support DirectX 11 on future hardware of class, but the mode things are going it looks as though nosotros'll all the same have to await a few months earlier their response to the new Radeon Hard disk line arrives.

AMD's pricing strategy with the Radeon HD 5000 series volition exist quite interesting likewise, as for the showtime time in a long while the company will be looking to take the functioning crown from Nvidia. Previous generation ATI graphics cards have been unable to compete with the fastest Nvidia solutions, forcing AMD to heavily disbelieve their products in an endeavor to deliver meliorate value.

In the terminate the Radeon Hard disk drive 4850 was competing with the much older GeForce 9800 GTX, while the Radeon Hard disk drive 4870 ran somewhat unopposed at $299. At this toll indicate the 4870 delivered an impressive level of performance, though it was overshadowed past improved GeForce GTX graphics cards over the next 12 months.

The new Radeon Hard disk drive 5870 is in a very different position, though. This time around it looks like AMD is not going to be forced into a pricing state of war every bit easily -- at to the lowest degree not yet anyway. So for at present the Hd 5870 makes its debut with an MSRP of $380, while the Radeon HD 5850 is also arriving today priced at around $260.

This makes the Radeon HD 5870 roughly $120 cheaper than today's undisputable functioning champ, the GeForce GTX 295. It also makes it nigh twice as costly as the Radeon HD 4890, however, which begs the question: is the Radeon Hard disk drive 5870 really that much faster? Today we finally get to detect out, as we volition be comparing AMD's latest and greatest against every single high-terminate graphics menu released over the by year.