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ATI Radeon 5800 series coming your way

by: John -
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It looks like VR Zone's got some info on the upcoming graphics cards from AMD. Right now, the 4800 series is the tops for AMD but coming soon will be the 5800 series. You're looking at DirectX11 cards with 1GB of DDR5 memory and support for up to three monitors. There's accelerated video transcoding and from my talks with AMD a little bit ago, it would help with some of Windows 7's transcoding functionality. DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL support will be in place as well as support for OpenGL 3.1. As usual, CrossFireX is in there should you decide to pair up the card with another one. Supposedly, there's a paper launch in September with retail availability in October and considering that DirectX 11 won't appear until Windows 7 with Vista support down the road, it's a good time to launch the card then.

As an owner of the ATI Radeon 4870 card, I was very happy with how it turned out and how it brought AMD/ATI back to the forefront of gaming graphics. For a while there, NVIDIA had the leg up but everything seems to be cyclical in the graphics card realm. Currently, I'm using the GeForce GTX 275 in my system but really you can't go wrong with the 4890 from AMD as that thing's got some muscle to it. I'm anxious to see how the new 5800 series works out against what we currently have now.