ATI dropped a bomb on the graphics card world with the Sapphire HD 5870 so it should only be a short while before the follow-up came out in the form of the Sapphire HD 5850. Based on the same "Cypress" RV870 core the HD 5850 should offer performance that scales well in games and and some much needed shoring up of the performance in the $250 price range. The Sapphire HD 5850 is built using the same 40nm process and comes equipped with the same 2.15 Billion transistors and 1GB of GDDR5 memory as the HD 5870. Clock speeds come in at a reasonable 1000MHz on the memory and 725MHz on the core giving up a hefty amount of speed to the 5870 in the clock speed department. As the second DX 11 video card to market ATI is ramping up a full DX 11 lineup for the future of gaming even though the DX 11 titles have not made it to market yet. The HD 5850 is has more in store as ATI is making the move to compete with Nvidiain the GPU compute market while offering improved graphics performance in DX0/10/10.1 titles.