A little over a year ago, AMD released the ATI Radeon HD 5000 family of graphics products and by doing so, AMD became the first company to offer DirectX 11 compatibility when Windows 7 was launched. This was a big deal and over the past year AMD has successfully released eleven video cards in the Radeon HD 5000 series and sold more than 25 million DX11 video cards. What is really interesting is that NVIDIA is still releasing more cards in their GeForce 400 series of products. NVIDIA has just five DirectX 11 cards released and the company still does not have a solid top-to-bottom DirectX 11 product stack like AMD does. AMD on the other hand is going to be releasing their next generation of GPUs, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 Graphics Series later this week. The first two cards that will be released will be the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and AMD Radeon HD 6850 graphics cards. Unlike in past years AMD won't be starting with their flagship video cards, but rather a pair of cards that are positioned in the Gamers Sweet Spot” as they like to call it.