Surprise – Radeon HD 8000 series PC GPUs tipped for Q3 release

It looks like the PC graphics card battle of 2013 is far from over.

Yesterday’s release of Nvidia’s GTX 770 (and last week’s release of the GTX 780) had seemingly signalled an end to the PC GPU wars for the foreseeable future, but talk now suggests AMD is rallying a counter attack.

Tom’s Hardware reports that stats have leaked for AMD’s Radeon HD 8000 series discrete desktop GPUs. Until recently it was thought that the 8000 series would be simply a rebranded version of the 7000 cards only available to OEM manufacturers.

That is seemingly not now the case.

Indeed, supposed stats have leaked for a number of cards including the HD 8970, HD 8950, HD 8870, and HD 8850.

The HD 8970 apparently houses 6GB of DDR5 and outperforms the HD 7970 by a margin of 35 per cent. The 8950 will outdo the same card by around ten per cent while the 8870 looks to better the performance of the HD 7850 by an impressive 40 per cent.

Prices are said to span between $599 for the HD 8970 all the way down to $229 for the 8850.

All cards are pegged for a Q3 2013 release.

The move will be a blow to Nvidia which yesterday seemed to finally take the value fight to AMD with its 350 GTX 770, which just pips AMD’s current leader the 7970 in the performance stakes.