At launch date, only a few dozen HD 5870 cards are available in Europe and even then we are talking about selected big and important markets.

Availability on launch is so poor that you will have to be very lucky to buy one. The situation will get slightly better next week and it should finally get to normal volume availability in October.

AMD will probably tell its investors that it started selling DirectX 11 hardware in Q3 2009 as we are technically still living the last days of Q3, as it will make them look better.

The cards are fast, but as many pointed out HD 5870 is not faster than Geforce GTX 295, which is something that many have expected. Radeon 5850 will also start selling in October time, but remember, last summer when ATI launched 4870, the card was almost impossible to buy and weeks if not months after, the availability finally improved.