We've learned that ATI's upcoming mainstream DirectX 11 part, something that we call RV870, should be ready for the Windows 7 launch.

ATI might even launch its card earlier, but if they align the launch with Windows 7, ATI should be launching its DirectX 11 performance card in the second half of October.

This is at least timeframe that ATI plans for its hardware launch and we are quite sure that ATI should launch DirectX 11 before Nvidia. At the same time, we’ve heard that “RV870” is not really a brand new architecture, and that you should expect more shaders, DirectX 11 support but all based on RV770 concepts.

Naturally, the new ATI chip is 40nm which enables higher clocks and more transistors and shaders but so far we don’t have any numbers we can quote.