Competition has always been feirce between nVidia and ATI, and this past year, despite the economic downturn, has been no exception. ATI released their Radeon R700 (HD4000) series video cards nearly a year ago in June 2008, and  a few months ago, added a new flagship single GPU card, the Radeon HD4890. More recently detailss surfaced about nVidia’s plans to launch the G300 lineup, keeping the rivalry alive.

 Now ATI is getting ready to wipe the slate and start from square, with rumours that the next generation graphics cards, based off the 40nm acrchitechture and DirectX11 compliant, will be released within the current year (2009), giving consumersthe perfect excuse to upgrade for the holidays.

Leaked details from Hardware-Infos, hint at some of the specs and the what the lineup may entail. The RV810 is suggested as the base model, with an R800 (possible dual RV870) rounding out the top end. The inbetween spots filled with the single RV870 powerhouse, and the mainstream RV840. The reports suggest that the top end RV870 chip may feature 1200 stream processors – the current HD4890 (RV790) features only 800 -  and 143BG/s of bandwidth. Following ATI’s new naming scheme, the cards will most likely be branded with familiar labels such as the HD5870X2, HD5870 and HD5850 – which could be hitting store shelves ase early as summer!