If you follow PC hardware news, you may have been hearing about ATI’s 5800 series for some time. Well, they’re finally here, as yesterday AMD announced that the graphics cards are finally available for purchase. AMD is putting out two cards, the 5850 and the 5870, priced at $250 and $399 respectively. If you haven’t heard of these cards before, they’re the first graphics cards designed from the ground up to support DirectX 11, so if you plan on gaming on a Windows 7 machine you’ll want to look into these.
The benchmarks I’ve seen so far show the 5870 performing pretty impressively — it tends to outperform NVIDIA’s GTX 285 in most tests, and can hold it’s own against the 295. While overall the 295 tends to get slightly better numbers, it’s also currently $100 more expensive, and uses up a whole lot more power. That said, don’t be surprised if NVIDIA drops the prices on the 200 series soon.
Any of you guys running Windows 7 planning on picking one of these up? Do you care at all about the lack of PhysX?
