We are well on our way into the New Year and as of yet ATI continues to face no real challenge from Nvidia on the DirectX11 front. This seems to be eerily familiar in a role reversal with ATI now leading the way and Nvidia lagging behind. It was way back in September when ATI launched it's new product which seems light years ago. In the mean time ATI continues to pump out SKUs in the 5000 series this time with the Radeon 5670, the first DX11 sub-$100 graphics card.

The core of the new card runs at 775MHz with 400 stream processors for the core and 1GHz with either 512 MB of 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The card should come in around 60W TDP and boasts the major features that all the 5000 series cards have of course including DX11, second-gen 40nm manufacturing process, Eyefinity, HDMI bitstreaming, UVD2, and video conversion.

The price point is $99 which means AMD has taken no time to get to the under $100 market and seems ready to move on their product line to the 5000 series as quickly as possible. Thw 1GB cards should go for about $10-15 more. This is one of the benefits of them targeting their highest end single GPU, upper mid-range market. Although these days with no competition even AMD's best single GPU cards go for more than $300 easily.

We've seen a similar chart since the 3000 series and with three generations this plan seems to have more than worked.

Not a shock but the mainstream segment is the largest segment for gaming.

ATI still gives you quite a bit of power for $99.

We're pressed for time so onto benchmarks.