At midnight last night, ATI's Radeon 5870 and 5850 went on sale, and promptly sold out just about everywhere. According to Anandtech, we can thank Dell for that one. So usual, Anand did a great job covering what makes this new GPU so great, so I'm going to point you over to his write-up for technology and numbers. If you'd rather have the spoiler, here it is: 5870 is faster than every single-GPU card by a lot. It's even faster than some high-end dual-card setups and most dual-GPU cards. If you want blistering speed, 5870 is the place to be for the next 2 months.

update: all of the R870 GPUs apparently went into the 5870, so 5850 availability is scheduled for next month.

5870 also brings the era of DirectX 11 to PCs, about a month ahead of Windows 7's actual launch. DirectX 11 was covered very well by Anand, and it looks like there will even be a few games that support it by the end of the year. Like most technologies, it won't be fully implemented until much later, but it's nice to see some titles like DIRT2 supporting some form of DX11 this early. What's really important about DX11 is that it is a super-set of DX10, so writing games for both should be really easy. Developers have a set of extras, kind of like PhysX runs now, that are turned on if you have the hardware. This should help push games away from the now-ancient DX9 and towards DX10/11.

So why care so much about DX11? Well, the most visible addition will be what's called tessellation. DirectX 10 brought a geometry shader to the package, but tessellation is really the next big step. Developers are able to render a rather simple model, while using the tessellation features to provide texture. This means models can become much more detailed while framerates stay the same, in theory. See this picture from Anand's write-up to get the idea.

Another big addition is better texture compression. Currently, we use a technology to compress textures that introduces some artifacts in the image. Microsoft's new method drastically reduces this corruption, which will make for a much crisper texture. I can only imagine what the next installment of Batman will look like if it uses these technologies.

Unfortunately, until consoles catch up we're going to have a selection of half-assed ports that will run in DX9, only because the 360 and PS3 can't keep up. While the technology gap always helps PC gamers achieve higher framerates and better graphics, the lack of sales lately has pushed developers into "get more money" mode. This means supporting the lowest common denominator to increase market penetration. If you haven't noticed by now, this is becoming a very sore spot for me, and I will fight this change 'till the end. I still believe that the PC is by far the best gaming platform, and have much more fun playing games on mine than my PS3.

That's about it for now, I'm still working on a Batman wrap-up with framerates, videos and screenshots, but as this is my first time, it's a little tough. I really love what they've done with the PhysX in this game, to the point that it is worth paying an extra $100 for a 9800GT to run it well, or taking this opportunity to upgrade your card to a GTX 260. Even better, with Lucid's multi-GPU technology right on the horizon, you'll get performance from both cards in all titles soon enough.