AMD has just pulled the tarp off its new AMD Radeon HD 7970 Southern Islands graphics card and we can finally unveil our thoughts on its brand new card and architecture.
It's the fastest single-GPU graphics card and also a graphics card of firsts.
AMD is adamant it is no copycat though.
"From a purely technical point of view, the architecture that we've moved to is similar," says Mike Mantor, AMD Senior Fellow Architect. "On the GPU side though we've been investigating this scalar architecture for some time. We had good ideas how we'd go about it, what our gains would be and the cost of actually implementing it."
As well as being the fastest at stock clocks it's also one hell of a serious overclockers graphics card. We managed to push ours from 925MHz up to 1,125MHz.
The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is also rather expensive.
We don't have final UK prices yet but our best guess is around £450, with future overclocked versions coming in considerably more.
That's good news for Nvidia as it makes the impressive GTX 580 a far more reasonable proposition at just £365.
And talking of Nvidia, it's own new architecture, the Kepler-based graphics cards, will be available early Spring 2012. According to Nvidia insiders it's feeling quietly confident about its ability to compete with the Radeon HD 7970.
We've got a full, in-depth review of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 here.