Nvidia has launched their refined Fermi, the GT110-based GTX580. Dubbed as what the GTX480 should be during launch, it nabbed the king of DirectX 11 single chip card easily. However, AMD wouldn’t sit quietly and let them have all the fun. Typical GPU war, AMD has announced during their financial analyst day the roadmap for their Radeon cards, thus making them official. There’ll be two new high-end GPUs coming next month, and one final master of all in the first quarter of 2011.

The slides explicitly describe the recently launched HD 6870 / 6850 as mere refreshes, aiming to bring HD 5800 series performance in a more efficient and budget package, but peek beyond them and you’ll see an armada of HD 6900 chips just itching to bring the fight to NVIDIA and its newly crowned GTX 580 king of the single-GPU hill. No specs yet, of course, but at least we now know that we’ll have a great show of GPU war this coming holiday season. Lovely time for some hardware upgrades. Now all I need is an updated V7 Folding Client from Stanford with the Open CL coding optimized.

SOURCE via AMD(pdf)