14 DAY TRIAL // Recent reports seem to indicate that AMD's R7xx series of graphics cards has nothing but a bright future ahead. Apparently, the Sunnyvale-based chip manufacturer is planning to release a couple of new graphics cards based on the 55nm manufacturing technology. They will be part of the company's R7xx series and will slowly replace the older HD 3xx0 models.
Even more, we won't even have to wait too long for the new cards to drop. The estimated date is for sometime in September, which is when we'll have at our disposal four new possible SKUs, in XT and PRO flavors. The new Radeons are not meant to raise the performance bar for AMD's latest graphics card lineup - as a matter of fact, this particular aspect will be dealt with by the upcoming RV700 dual-GPU card. To be more precise, the card will be designed to replace the Radeon 3650 and 3450, bring increased performance than these models, for a price situated below the $150 mark.
The mainstream graphics chip is codenamed RV730. Its XT version is going to be faster than the Radeon HD 3650 and will slowly replace the mainstream card on the market. The RV730-based cards will sell for a price between $129 to $149, a little detail that should attract the attention of mid-range users. The other chip, the RV710 is billed as a replacement for the Radeon 3450 cards and should sell for around $99. No other details regarding performance levels are currently available, but considering that they are meant to replace mid-range and low-range cards, they will probably bring a small improvement in performance numbers as well.
In other news, AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 4870 X2, which will sport 2GB of GDDR5 memory, is said to become available for purchase for $549. Although it's with $50 more expensive than NVIDIA's current flagship model, the card is expected to overtop the performance achieved by the GTX 280. However, a drop in price should become manifest the moment NVIDIA goes ahead with its 55nm GT200 cards, whose official release date is just around the corner, as they say.