We talked to a several ATI partners and it turns out that a new kicker card is still on hold. At this time, ATI usually releases a 'kicker' card, a faster version of existing architecture, but at this time they still haven’t done it.

There are a few reasons and the most important one is that Radeon HD 5970 is the fastest card on the market and currently the only DirectX 11 dual-chip card. The second reason is that RV870 chip doesn’t offer much overclocking space and even when overclocked it doesn’t deliverer major performance increase.

Overclocked Radeon HD 5870 cards have been out for a months now and we even tested some of them, but it looks like partners have tapped this GPU already, and it has little more to offer.

Despite many believes ATI is still preparing a next generation 40nm part to launch in late 2010 as 28nm from both Globalfoundries and TSMC won’t be ready before first half of 2011 and even then its questionable if they can pull some good yields.

Nvidia’s next generation GF104 chip is also planned for this summer, but most likely the latter part of the summer, and this chip might give ATI’s Radeon 5000 architecture a run for its money.

All in all, at present time we are not aware of any new cards that ATI wants to add to its existing Radeon 5000 series portfolio.