AMD Radeon HD 5850, 5870 Leak

Here we go again, lets all rush out and buy a DX11 GC, wait 6 months for a stable driver, a year for the first DX11 game - which then proves too powerful for our shiny new GC - and in the mean time we can all use that extra power to play a bunch of console titles.

It really is a great time to be a PC gamer! lol

@ Sunny
I'm stopping myself from playing certain console games until I can afford the 'full' PC experience: Namely, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, etc.
I love my nice cheap Xbox 360, and pick up older games for £10-20 now and again. However, I grew up playing Unreal, Quake and Half-life with a mouse and refuse to cripple my FPS gaming experience with a thumbstick!
Here's hoping games continue to be deveolped cross-platform.

I'm pretty sure that most people expected the next cards from ATI to be of the form 5800, at least to begin with. I guess this is just confirmation. I am still anticipating performance figures however, for one good reason: nVidia have had to play catchup to get DirectX 11 fully implemented in their next cards. Since DirectX 10.1 is a strict subset of DX11, almost all the work ATI had to do was on verification since they already fully supported DirectX10.1, unlike nVidia, and they can then focus on performance increases. I also expect then that, just like the increased driver stability in Windows 7 (compared to Vista at launch), means I'm going to get a 5870 as soon as it arrives.

@Carcharodon
In one year most enthusiasts will have upgraded their card again anyway, and the non-enthusiasts wouldn't be purchasing these cards in the first place, they would wait for more mainstream cards to be released, probably early next year. I see your point, but I just don't think it is of particular bearing, since it won't actually affect many people. Early adopters generally have the money to spend buying into new technology, so they are unlikely to have any qualms over buying more at a later date to play games at an acceptable framerate. See above for my opinion on driver quality.