Late June/Early July rumors started spreading throughout the various hardware forums that AMD has three new chips coming to the market; Hemlock, Cypress and Juniper, part of AMD’s “Evergreen” family.
Now that samples are hitting the reviewers and some even making it for sale, I will try my best to explain why I do not think its great enough to counter Nvidia’s GT300.

When AMD released their RV770 and farther down the line the RV790 it took the scene by storm, who could have thought a graphics chip could show so much efficiency for the price, targeted to compete
with the GTX260 Core 216 and the GTX275, the 4870 and 4890’s went beyond the call of duty, coming close to the Performance of the bad boy GTX280/285 in some titles, which probably caused a panic within
the Nvidia organization, causing Nvidia to quickly drop prices on their more expensive cards to try to compete with the juggernaut AMD designed.

Now to the hard stuff to write about. It is known in its infancy the HD58xx series doesn’t have full driver optimizations to show what it’s truly capable but I think it will not be as fast as GT300.
I’ve been spending the past few weeks looking over every HD5870 review I could find and the results are very great. Staying close or beating the GTX295 in some titles, and HD5870 crossfire
being the fastest multi-card configuration currently available by beating everything. But I do not think a 100% increase in performance over the older 4870/4890’s is good enough to compete with
the next single card offering Nvidia will show, the GT300 could be weeks, even weeks away from a GT300 release and that could allow them the time to take grasp and embarrass AMD’s offerings.

If GT300 is indeed grossly faster then the HD5870 in single card vs. single card, could AMD bring back the ideology they had with the RV770?

Only time will tell if AMD can hold this performance crown or have to recede to the drawing boards and make a chip to best GT300, thank you for taking the time to read this little rant.