The Radeon HD 6700 cards are set to be released in little over a month, around October the 13th.

This is great for the Ati/Nvidia price wars so if you're thinking of getting a new video card I'd wait a month or two.

Source? Seems a little silly to release a new graphics card so soon after the last one. Seems like it has been less than a year.

It will make all the 5000 series cards price drop, but i think i may just buy another 5770 and corssfire it, or maybe just forget that and buy a 6000 series.

I agree with muffin_man. Only a few months back (So it seems) I pre-ordered my 5850.

I heard that the HD6xxx series announcement will happen in October but the cards won't be in shops until November

In the meantime, nVidia will bring out more mainstream Fermi cards as well -- the GT440 looks interesting as it's set to take on the popular HD5770. Considering nVidia's excellent GTX460 that was aggressively priced against the HD5850, perhaps they can repeat that with the GT440 ? Though I don't expect them to undercut the GTX460 in performance.

nVidia could also be holding a trump card up its sleave for the highend: although the initial Fermi cards (GTX480 & GTX470) had some issues, it was clear that if the cards' clockspeeds had been on the level nVidia aimed for, they probably would've beaten even AMD's best (HD5970). Now that they appear to have solved those issues, they might be waiting for a shot at AMD's 6xxx series?

Perhaps we will actually see Crysis² running smoothly on mainstream cards when it comes out in February 2011 !!

Rumors from various internet forums place the 6000 series at the earliest around Q2, Q3 of 2011. So yeah, at least a year until they announce the cards. I find this to be at least semi-accurate as no fab plants are anywhere near the 28nm process (which is what the 6000s would be).

Besides that, directX 12, or whatever new graphics process isn't even on the horizon, so it would be less than advantageous to produce a bunch of cards working with old technology.

It'll be good for the price wars. I paid $450AUD for an Asus HD5870 over six months ago and so I would expect in the next two to three months to pay that or less for the HD5970 which is currently around $700AUD whereas the GTX480 is still around $500AUD. So it will be interesting to see what happens.

There's been a lot of speculation as to what the 6000 series cards will do, ie clock speeds etc. If you go by last years improvement we should see maybe a 30% increase in performance but that's just a moot point at the moment. I guess we'll find out in late october and when they start shipping in November.

Sounds like a great time to upgrade from my dual hd 3870 setup. Can't wait for some guy to put his hd5870 up on ebay at a steal

The codenames for the new AMD cards have turned up in last month's Catalyst driver so they should be pretty close to release. The 32nm manufacturing process for the 'Northern Islands' series ran into trouble so they went back to a 40nm production on these cards.

Makes the most sense to me too, Would be dumb of them to release brand new spanking cards on old tech when they could wait it out abit and bring them out with something new.

hmmm, i have a 5770, but 6000 series, yikes thats gonna be powerful.
Crysis 2 would look awesome on it!

Hmm, like i said Time for me to start putting back for an upgrade. Hd3000 series to 6000, don't mind if I do.

I was a week off in my ofiginal post. The release date is the 18th of October now - sorry

I've only just bought my 5770 and I'm more than happy with it.

Not sure if you can crossfire on an SLi mobo?

No, for regular cards, it needs a CrossFire board to combine 2 AMD cards, but it can work if you get a second card that has a Hydra chip on it (and then you can even combine AMD & nVidia cards). As far as I know, this PowerColor HD5770 Evolution is still the only card with a Hydra chip for the moment.

ADL how does the Hydra chip funtion? Would you need both AMD and Nvidia drivers for the card or does Hydra provide the necessary drivers? I could see that being very complicated and buggy. But AMD + Physics = goodness

I think you install both as seperate graphics cards with their own drivers (which need to be versions that are supported by Hydra), and then the Hydra chip+driver intercepts the graphics commands and sends them off to either card. I don't know if the nVidia physx driver is supported, but I believe nVidia has recently announced that they'll open that up, anyway.

I'm pretty sure nVidia has gone out of their way to disable physX if an AMD driver is detected on the system. Bad business on their part as anyone who likes AMD for the value, and still wants physics with a cheaper nVidia card is out of luck. This does a pretty good job explaining hydra; Here Unfortunately, only one manufacturer is selling the technology and neither of the GPU makers are supporting it. I suppose this doesn't really matter as very few people buy (or would buy) a second graphics card for the sole purpose of physics rendering.

Seems I was wrong in the HD6000 prediction however; they have the 6870 and 6850 announced with benchmarks.

I'm always a generation or two behind... My 4850 HD runs anything I throw at it, but I still drool at the the 5770 occassionally, but a 6000 series! Woah.

Yeah, I've been thinking about an HD6850, but my HD4850 is still good for any game so I can't justify getting it yet -- maybe I'll reconsider if the prices drop more when the new HD69xx series is released. I don't really want to crossfire with a secondhand HD4850 as the powerdraw might kill my PSU.