With these first Radeon HD 5800 cards, ATI puts a little pressure on nVIDIA, who has decided to take the stance to not bother launching their DX11 models so far. nVIDIA claims that the DirectX 11 APIs shouldn’t and perhaps will not be the only reason to buy a new card. ATI instead is betting on their new models to be the next big selling point for the company.

But why is it so important to compete in the graphic card market? The numbers in this case show the reasons why. According to AMD, the 2010 should bring an income of 3.4 billion dollars, which are basically divided by nVIDIA and AMD as the main graphic card manufacturers in the market.

With these series of articles, we will analyze the numbers obtained with a Sapphire ATI RAdeon HD5870, taking into consideration the DirectX 11 support, the ATI Eyefinity and ATI Stream technologies.