The day we've been waiting for since the past couple of months has finally arrived. AMD, which pioneered DirectX 11 compliant PC consumer graphics, is out with its second-generation DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The company has enjoyed a 6 month head-start into the race for DirectX 11 graphics hardware market dominance, which also reflected in both growth of market-share, and domination in sales. The time passed by also allowed AMD to refine and fine-tune its architecture to better suit the existing 40 nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per mm² of die-area (plays an important role in product pricing), compared to the previous-generation Evergreen architecture.The new architecture also refines and expands on the product's feature-set, giving the GPU an even bigger role to play in today's PC than simply rendering 3D graphics: that's accelerating smooth and crystal-clear high-definition video, and getting into CPU territory, by number-crunching for applications at a much more parallel scale than multicore processors.The product also marks a fundamental shift in AMD's approach to the market. Until now, the HD x800 series (such as HD 3800 series, HD 4800 series, and HD 5800 series) is regarded as that class of SKUs that give you the highest single-GPU performance possible for the prevalent architecture. But now, AMD has restructured its nomenclature in a big way.When it came to light that Barts, oversimplistically a successor to the Juniper GPU (which makes up the Radeon HD 5700 series), is going to be branded under the HD 6800 series, it created quite some drama; with some users claiming it to be very gimmicky of AMD to release a series that isn't much of an upgrade option for existing users of HD 5800 series GPUs. That's not the case, because AMD made it adequately public through the press, its reasoning behind using the HD 6800 series as the "gamer's sweet spot" series, and consolidating all higher-end SKUs into the Radeon HD 6900 series, slated for next month. Besides, it's not like AMD is asking Radeon HD 5800 series kind of prices for today's GPUs. The main design ideology behind the HD 6800 series, as AMD put it, is to give you Radeon HD 5800 series performance at sweet-spot prices.The ASUS EAH6850 DirectCu we're reviewing today is ASUS' in-house design implementation that sports its DirectCu (direct copper) GPU cooler, which has quite some credentials, making it to many performance-segment graphics cards from the company. The PCB is ASUS' in house design, too, but borrows heavily from AMD's essential reference design. ASUS is also giving you a small core clock bump, up to 790 MHz from the AMD reference clock of 775 MHz.