ATI and NVIDIA are duking it out and over the last year with the economy in the toilet, most of the cards the pair has introduced have been lower priced mid-range cards rather than high-end parts. Those high-end parts often cost upwards of $500 or more each. Today images of a new high-end video card from ATI have leaked online.

The new card is called the ATI HD 5790 and it sports dual GPUs on one PCB. The specifications for the card are unknown. Performance data was reportedly available but AMD forced the information to be taken down, and surprisingly allowed the photos to remain.

We already know all there really was to know about the ATI HD 5770 and 5750 video cards ahead of their official launch. The cards turned up online in benchmarks a few weeks back showing decent performance for the price.

Today AMD went official with the new video cards and the specs we heard in the leaks turned out to be accurate. Namely, the 5770 has 800 stream processors and a core clock of 850MHz. The card has a memory clock of 1.2GHZ and will come in 512MB and 1GB versions using GDDR5 RAM.

Apple has been increasingly getting into bed with NVIDIA when it comes to GPUs for its line of notebooks. The problem is that many of the 9400 series NVIDIA GPUs that the company put inside Apple machines failed.

This opened the door for AMD and the company has announced that its video cards are now found inside the new iMac and Mac Pro computer systems. AMD reports that the new video cards support Snow Leopard’s OpenCL 1.0 implementation.

AMD and NVIDIA are two of the biggest names in the GPU industry. AMD is traditionally the bridesmaid and never the bride when it comes to holding the most market share in the GPU industry. AMD has finally grabbed the crown from NVIDIA in at least one GPU segment.

AMD has announced that new figures from Jon Peddie Research have been released that show it now has the bulk of the discrete GPU market in the notebook segment. According to JPR figures, ATI gained 36.5% market share and grew its quarter-to-quarter shipments 87.27% for the first six months of 2009.

AMD is fighting hard to gain some momentum in the CPU and GPU market after five consecutive quarterly losses. The way to gain traction in the marketplace with gamers and enthusiasts is to offer products that perform better than or as well as the competition at lower prices.

AMD has announced this week that it is offering the first factory GPU to hit 1GHz. The GPU is included on the Radeon HD 4890 and is overclocked right from the factory using stock air-cooling. The GPU is paired with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM and delivers 1.6 TeraFLOPS of processing power.

At CES 2009 I spent some time in meetings with the guys from AMD. One of the products they were showing off at the time was the HP Pavilion DV2 ultra-portable notebook. The machine was the showpiece for a new AMD processor aimed at the ultra-portable market.

The DV2 uses the AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU and has a 12.1-inch LED backlit LCD with a 1280 x 800 screen resolution. The little DV2 is not MacBook Air thin, but it is a svelte little beast. Measurements are 11.5-inches L x 9.5-inches D x 0.93 to 1.29-inches H and weighs 3.95 pounds.

When most of us think of video cards, we immediately think of gaming computers. Gamers spend hundreds of dollars on their video cards in search of good frame rates and graphics. In the professional world, graphics cards are used to provide data to multiple monitors.

ATI has announced its latest pro graphics card called the ATI FirePro 2450. The card is low profile and half-height making it suitable for small form factor machines. Despite its small size it packs in 512MB of RAM and supports four DVI or VGA monitors at resolutions up to 1920 x 1200.

Discrete graphics cards in notebooks make more than playing games possible. This is why you see discrete graphics cards on notebooks that are not meant for gaming. A discrete GPU on a notebook also allows the decoding of HD video on the GPU freeing the CPU up so the entire system runs faster.

AMD has announced at CeBIT that it has the world’s first 40nm GPUs that are in its Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and 4830 lines. The GPUs support DirectX 10.1 games and offer HD multimedia capability. AMD says the GPUs are also optimized for long battery life.

AMD and NVIDIA are the only two companies for most consumers in the discrete video card industry. The two firms are always battling for the superior products in the market place. Over the last few years, NVIDIA has been the more dominant firm in performance, but ATI has scored a few wins, especially with its newer high-end video cards.

Yesterday AMD officially confirmed rumors that were floating around claiming that it would be dropping the price on two of its most popular video cards. Specifically the price is dropping on the Radeon 4850, 4870 512MB, and the 4870 1GB cards.

We’ve been seeing all-in-one PCs more often lately. The latest is this 18.5-incher, the ZX2300 from Gateway, which should be available in Taiwan soon. The system is powered by an AMD Athlon 2650e CPU that runs on Windows XP Home, and supports 1GB RAM and a modest 160GB hard drive. LCD screen resolution is 1366 x 768.

The 18.5-inch display will give you a 16:9 aspect ratio. The ZX2300 also features Wi-Fi, webcam and a 16X LightScribe DVD burner. The PC will sell for about $530. No word on exactly when it will drop, but those in Taiwan will have a first crack at it.

The economy is bad and when the leading CPU maker in the world, Intel, announces that its profits aren’t that great and it will be restructuring to better compete you can bet that the second place chipmaker is on rough times as well.

AMD, said second place chipmaker, announced its Q4 2008 and fiscal 2008 revenues and things don’t look good for the company. AMD posted revenue in Q4 2008 of $1.162 billion, a decrease of 35% from Q3 2008 and 33% percent down from the same quarter of 2007.

I was at CES last week schlepping around the halls looking for something cool. Unfortunately cool was in short supply at this year’s show. One of the things that I did find interesting was the new mobile GPUs that AMD was showing off.

AMD introduced its line of Radeon Mobility 4000 video cards for notebooks that includes the HD 4800, HD 4600, HD 4500 and HD 4300 GPUs. The HD 4800 is the first mobile GPU according to AMD to break the teraflop barrier.

This is one of the coolest, most awesome, most jawdropping PC case mods we’ve seen in awhile. This AMD Phenom PC Case opens up in almost all directions, and looks a lot like a Transformer. It even features a green lighting scheme. Seriously, this thing looks like it’s about to take flight and fight another robot and fill your home with explosions and flying parts.

It’s got a certain classic Cylon look about it too. Look at the picture. Now look at yours. Yeah, now that you’ve seen it, you know what is missing in your life. It was created by Bill Owen, who is a true genius among men. We are not worthy.

I am a big fan of computer hardware and have worked with XFX for several years reviewing NVIDIA video cards they make around the web. The best thing about XFX is that they offer some of the fastest video cards on the market thanks to serious overclocking.

XFX and AMD announced that XFX has become an AMD video card partner. XFX will be bringing ATI HD 4000 series video cards to market in early 2009. This is great news for gamers since XFX offers the best warranty in the industry.

There are still many gamers who have yet to upgrade to Windows Vista. Part of Windows Vista that was most appealing to gamers was DirectX 10 compatibility. DirectX 10 is something you can’t get on Windows XP.

According to AMD when Windows 7 hits market, widely believed to be mid-2009, DirectX 10.1 will be fully supported. According to AMD DirectX 10.1 will be used in the API for the Windows Desktop Manager in Windows 7.