In the wee hours of the morning AMD released the HD 6870 and 6850 upon the world and seemingly to retailers as the cards do appear to be available for purchase.  This is not quite a chip refresh, there are new features on this GPU that did not appear in Evergreen, specifically morphological anti-aliasing, HDMI 1.4a support, DisplayPort 1.2 support and the new UVD3 engine.  Unfortunately that is it for improvements, including performance.  Check out Ryan’s full review for all the gritty details.

“AMD was likely losing ground in the $200 segment and because of that felt the need to get a reply out sooner than its original schedule had intended. That is good news for gamers: now we have better, lower cost options from AMD and also a forced hand from NVIDIA that caused a price drop on the GTX 460 lineup. If I was given a $220 budget today and asked to pick between the AMD or NVIDIA options, I would probably lean towards the AMD HD 6870 if only for the triple monitor support; other users might value the ability to run some sort of 3D Vision gaming and PhysX titles better on the NVIDIA cards. It is a cop-out, but all of these cards are good options.”

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

Click Here to go to Video Cards  Graphics Cards