ATI To Challenge Fermi With Trillian

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Rumors are coming out that some in the computer hardware press are receiving review copies of a new ATI graphics card, which is codenamed “Trillian”. Despite likely being under NDA, leaks are reporting that the new Trillian cards will be ATI’s answer to NVIDIA’s upcoming Fermi GPUs, which’ll be marketed as the GeForce GTX 400-series.

It’s worth noting that the Trillian card isn’t a new GPU architecture like the Fermi is. Instead, it’s simply a new card in the Radeon HD 5000-series that has a higher factory clockspeed. Those who’ve got their hands on the Trillian card are reporting that it’s very similar to the existing Radeon HD 5800 cards, which were codenamed “Cypress”.

Site Fudzilla is speculating that the Trillian card is simply a factory overclocked 5870, which ATI will sell as the Radeon HD 5890. They did a similar thing last year with the Radeon HD 4870 and 4890, Fudzilla reports. Early benchmarks (albeit, ones provided by NVIDIA at this point) have the GeForce GTX 480 looking like it could take the crown of “best” graphics card from the Radeon HD 5970.

As you can imagine, when a new card takes the top spot, there is a lot of excitement and mindshare shift in the enthusiast community. It makes sense that AMD would try to steal some of the spotlight and sales with a new high-mid-range card.

Even if the GeForce GTX 480 is the new “top dog” in the graphics card arms race – it’s worth noting that the $600+ bleeding edge graphics cards of every generation make up a small percentage of total sales for the manufacturers, so a high-mid-range card, could sell better against the GeForce GTX 480, assuming they’ll both be released around the same time.