We have to tip our collective hat to AMD for making the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition a blazing-fast graphics card.

The wee AMD HD 7850 is going to face some stiff competition in this crowded price point, can it hold it's own against the crowd?

AMD claims this is the card for gamers wanting to hit the highest graphics settings without having to spend £300 on a GPU. Is it?

If AMD's HD 7970 debut Southern Islands card arrived in a fancy tux heralding a bunch of world firsts, this HD 7750 turns up in a Burton polo shirt and trainers.

We're putting our hopes on this AMD HD 7770 to deliver the best bits of the new AMD Southern Islands architecture for a more palatable price.

AMD is really putting the pressure on Nvidia now with its second release of the new AMD HD 7000 graphics card generation, the AMD Radeon HD 7950.

AMD has blinked first and has opted to release its brand new graphics card architecture before Nvidia, and just before the new year. So here it is, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 and, for the time being, it's the fastest graphics card around.

When is a Radeon HD 6670 not a Radeon HD 6670?

For just £76 the Radeon HD 6670 does represent a decent stab at budget gaming.

In the red corner- AMD. In the green corner, NVIDIA. Age-old adversaries locked in an epic technological arms race. Lately the battles have been fought at the high end of the price spectrum, atop Mount Expensive, both parties chucking massive dual-discrete GPUs at each other.

You need a fair amount of engineering muscle to jam two of the fastest GPUs you've ever manufactured onto one slab of PCB and still get it running happily, and that's exactly what AMD has done with this, the AMD Radeon HD 6990.

In performance terms the Radeon HD 6950 is a rather impressive beast. Considering it's around £80 cheaper than the Radeon HD 6970, and you're only losing a couple of frames per second on most of the benchmarks, that makes it doubly so.

Finally they've arrived; the much-anticipated Cayman GPU-powered HD 6900 series cards from AMD. And right here we've got the very top-end of AMD's latest single-GPU cards, the AMD Radeon HD 6970.

It's not woefully out-matched, but those that can afford the shift up to a 1GB GTX 460 will reap the benefits, whilst a £20 saving and plumping for the 768 version produces similar performance.

AMD needed to do something special to unseat the impressive power and value offered by the GTX 460. Importantly it hasn't managed it. Better performance or a lower price would have helped things here, but as it stands, this is hopefully no indication of what is set to come.