Recently, NVIDIA has launched two new graphics card designed to provide entry-level and mainstream users with decent graphics support at an affordable price. As expected, rival AMD and its subsidiary ATI have been working on the development of their own entry-level and mainstream-oriented graphics products and, despite the fact that the cards have not been released yet, the first pictures of them have already surfaced on the Internet.

As most of you must known by now, AMD rolled out its much-awaited high-performance dual-GPU graphics card earlier this month. Currently, the company's line of HD 4000-series cards counts no more than 3 models, namely the already successful Radeon HD 4850, the HD 4870 and the newly released HD 4870 X2. However, according to recent rumors and an article on the Hexus website, AMD is set to extend its HD 4000-series lineup with the release of three additional ATI Radeon graphics accelerators, targeted at the value and mainstream market segments.

Based on the RV730 XT, RV730 PRO and RV710 graphics processors, the new cards are expected to arrive sometime in September, which would coincide with the release of a number of other anticipated products, as already noted in several of our previous posts.

The value-oriented RV710 will be offered in both DDR2 and GDDR3 models, the Radeon HD 4450 and Radeon HD 4470, respectively. The mainstream RV730 Pro GPU will be featured on the HD 4650 graphics card, which will feature 256MB of GDDR3. The other mainstream-oriented graphics processor will come in the form of a Radeon HD 4670 card that is believed to offer 512MB or 1GB of GDDR3 memory. All in all, the upcoming months should bring us quite a few releases of new Radeon-based graphics cards.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, details regarding pricing are scarce. Nevertheless, all signs seem to point out that an official release date can't but be nearing.