We’re still not happy with NVIDIA’s failure to publish anything on its site alerting users about the doom that may befall them if they switched to the 196.75 drivers, but the company’s making an effort to get back into our good books with the first official video of its forthcoming GeForce GTX 480 and even a benchmark run against ATI’s flagship single-GPU card, the HD 5870 . It looks like you’ll need to jack in a pair of auxiliary power connectors — one 8-pin and one 6-pin — to power the first Fermi card, as well as plenty of clearance in your case to accommodate its full length (stop giggling!). NVIDIA’s benchmarking stressed the GTX 480’s superior tesselation performance over the HD 5870, but it was level pegging between the two cards during the more conventional moments. It’s all well and good being able to handle extreme amounts of tesselation, but it’ll only matter to the end user if game designers use it as extensively as this benchmark did.

The new Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 —based upon the acclaimed ATI HD 5970 chipset —is the new world’s fastest graphics card. Its 3DMark Vantage score is an insane 22,000 . The overclocked ATI GPU runs at 850MHz, which is supported by 4GB of DDR3 RAM (itself, clocked at 1,200MHz). And all this hardware necessitates three fans an a massive heatsink, making it thicker than your average video card. Outputs include two dual-link DVIs and one mini DisplayPort

The Radeon HD 5870, as shipped, is a very powerful graphics card—more than most people need, even, and at the very least, enough for anyone. Except, apparently, Asus. Asus’ plans for their newest Republic of Gamers (ROG) Radeon HD 5870-based card cater to a specific breed—the overclock-everything-for-the-sake-of-it PC tweakers, who are dwindling along with their gaming platform—but really, anyone can appreciate them: by default, the card’s GPU is cranked from 850 to 900MHz, and doubles the RAM to RAM to 2GB of DDR5 memory. If that’s not enough, you can dial your frequencies up using included overclocking software, which saves new settings directly to the card. And if you start to notice that delicious, telltale smell of melting silicon, you don’t even have to navigate software to fix things: mashing a physical button on the back of the card reverts it to stock settings.

You might not be a big graphics card PC buff, but in the under $100 sector, the new ATI Radeon HD 5570 is definitely a product to know. Tom’s Hardware shares their excellent, extremely thorough review of the product here. And to note, the 5570 basically the cheapest DX11 card that you can actually play games on, unlike the 5450 , which is for HTPCs and not so much for pew pew. In September of 2008—almost a year and a half ago—ATI surprised everyone on a budget with the launch of its Radeon HD 4670. Released at $80, the card was priced to fight the entry-level GeForce 9500 GT, and yet the 4670’s specifications were comparable to the previous-generation’s Radeon HD 3870 flagship. To make a long story short, the Radeon HD 4670’s performance humiliated its competition.

You might not be a big graphics card PC buff, but in the under $100 sector, the new ATI Radeon HD 5570 is definitely a product to know. Tom’s Hardware shares their excellent, extremely thorough review of the product here. And to note, the 5570 basically the cheapest DX11 card that you can actually play games on, unlike the 5450 , which is for HTPCs and not so much for pew pew. In September of 2008—almost a year and a half ago—ATI surprised everyone on a budget with the launch of its Radeon HD 4670. Released at $80, the card was priced to fight the entry-level GeForce 9500 GT, and yet the 4670’s specifications were comparable to the previous-generation’s Radeon HD 3870 flagship.

Well, this is nice: a Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card available on the cheap. It looks like you’re not sacrificing much in performance, either: The $60 Radeon 5450 has full DX11 graphics and Eyefinity multi-display support. The $60 version comes with a 512MB memory configuration, and you lose a little speed compared to the 5800 and 5600 lines. But the 5450 is also optimized for HTPCs, with HDMI 1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. UPDATED: Hey all! Took down a video that had been posted here previously, whose purpose was to demonstrate what DirectX is capable of. The 5450 does have DX11 support, but I didn’t mean to imply that this particular card would give you that exact performance shown in the video

It’s rare to see a rumor — hell, even a roadmap — pinpoint the timing of new releases quite so accurately, but our earlier report of ATI refreshing the middle and lower parts of its lineup turned out to be bang on. Following in the footsteps of the HD 5670 , we have the Radeon HD 5450, which drags the entry price for DirectX 11 and Eyefinity multi-monitor support all the way down to $50. Course, the processing power inside isn’t going to be on par with its elder siblings , but that also means the 5450 will run cool enough to be offered with half-height, passive cooling solutions as seen above. ATI’s focus here is on media PCs, with a DisplayPort, um… port, alongside HDMI 1.3a, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstreaming support.

There’s nothing new coming your way in terms of aesthetics from MSI’s line of “C” laptops, but under the hood we’ve got Core i Series processors. One of these fellas even sports an ATI Radeon HD5470 graphics card. The full laptop line includes the CX420, CR420 and CR720. The CX420 sports the aforementioned graphics card.

AMD and ATI have got yet another GPU contender under their sleeve, and this one’s got quite a one-two punch. The Radeon HD 5670 can boast DirectX 11 and Eyefinity support are for a suggested price less than one Benjamin Franklin. The usual suspects have weighed in on the card, and while “solid value” that outperforms its analogous NVIDIA GeForce GT 240. That’s not exactly an A+ grade, but we weren’t expecting it to go toe-to-toe to its older brothers costing hundreds of dollars apiece.

DirectX 11 has been chewed up and spit out by desktop GPUs over the past few months, but until CES 2010, laptops at large were left out of the raving. This week, AMD has introduced what it’s calling the world’s first mobile graphics with DX11 compatibility, and the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 — which just so happens to be featured in ASUS’ recently revealed G73jh — is leading the way. The HD 5800, HD 5700, HD 5600 and HD 5400 series are all new at the show, and each one comes with baked in support for ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology and helping tech-adoring geeks find their soulmates (as is clearly shown above). Hit the source link for more details on each, and figure on seeing these filter out to new ultraportables, mainstream rigs and gaming lappies in the seconds, days and weeks ahead.