It wasn’t long ago, in the scheme of things, that ATI released their HD 2000 series of video cards that brought in a budget DirectX 10 era, and now that have pushed a new product to the budget buyer, the HD 3800 series.
The series will come in 2 flavors, the HD 3850 and 3870, which main difference’s are DDR3 on the 3850 and DDR4 on the 3870. Otherwise, both cards support full 10.1, are built on the - world’s first - 55nm manufacture process, 666 million transistors, run on PCI Express 2.0 and the list just goes on. There is a million things to read about it, and there is no better place to read it then at the Reg Hardware Website.
Now to what the rest of us are after, the benchmarks. It is hard to say currently (different on every site), even though it is no limit to the amount of reviews already found around the net, but currently it sits around the HD 2900 series mark. Not bad when you consider the cards are going to sell for around the $US150-200 range.
It seems that AMDATI have gone all out on this offering, and it looks like it could do well. We will have to wait and see what NVidia have lying in wait before we give it the crown, but I personally have to say that this would be the next video card I put in my system.

For more info, click over to the Engadget Blog, or for a list of reviews, go to the DailyTech Website.