AMD Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 confirmed to be launched on 22.10.2010

[tajoh111]

i remember the 4770 being about the same perf as a 4850, but costing 10-20$ more.

Your wrong about that. The 4770 was only 100 dollars and soon reached 80-90 street price. Until the 4850 was EOL, it was never that cheap. Basically AMD is doing a repeat of what it did that generation for performance but not saving you really that much money. The msrp of the 4850 was 200 dollars, the msrp of the 4770 was 100 dollars. Now look at this generation, the msrp of the 5850 is 259 dollars, the likely msrp of the 6770/6870 is 250 dollars(and bart should be cheap to make as it is alot smaller 100mm2 less and the yields should be fantastic compared to cypress). This should be obvious why they had to use the shady name if you look at this a 6770 at 250 is a damn tough sell and honestly, if you look at the performance jump of earlier x770(both the 4770 and the 5770) series, naming bart xt as a 6770 makes way more sense.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/ati-ra...d-4770-review/

AMD is not close to offering the value it once did. It taking advantage of no competition which sucks for us and even worse for Nvidia.