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The claim that the newly revealed ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card is indeed the "fastest graphics card in the world" isn't just boasting by parent company AMD. Hardware reviews from a number of web sites have confirmed that the performance of the new card blows away the previous king, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 295.

The big reason for such a boost is AMD's decision to put two of their high end GPUs from ATI on one card. That should enable the card to run upcoming DirectX11 PC games like Dirt 2, Aliens Vs Predator and Battlefield Bad Company 2 with all of the graphics turned up but still have a decent frame rate. Of course you will have to pay a whopping $600 for that privilege. Nvidia, we have to ask . . . where are you and why are you letting AMD beat you like this?

It's a double whammy of graphics card update goodness today. AMD's ATI unit has just released their official Catalyst 9.11 drivers for their Radeon based video cards. The release notes have all the details about the new drivers which include some bug fixes for games like Tom Clancy's HAWX, Wolfenstein and World in Conflict.

Not to be outdone, ATI's main rival Nvidia has released new beta drivers for its GeForce family of graphics chips today. Among other things the beta drivers add new SLI support for a number of recently released PC games such as Borderlands, Modern Warfare 2, and others.

You can now add Battlefield Bad Company 2 to the list of upcoming games that will be supporting the new DirectX11 graphics API. The Tech Report has received an updated list of all the officially announced DirectX11 game titles from AMD which currently has the only graphics card that supports DirectX11.

The list of games and game engines that will have DirectX11 features has been growing slowly ever since the first titles were revealed a few months ago. Currently there's just two titles that support DirectX11; the RTS game Battleforge (via a patch) and the Russian and German versions of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat. The next DirectX11 game due in stores is the PC version of Dirt 2 which will ship on December 1.

It's only been a day since Windows 7 officially released, and there is less than a handful of games that currently support DirectX 11, but there is now a benchmark available to gamers to see how well their hardware performs.

Developed by Unigine Corp using its proprietary Unigine engine technology, Heaven the first benchmark that measures the performance of DirectX 11 while showcasing its beauty. System requirements are shown after the jump along with a video of what the benchmark looks like.

Features include:

• Native support of OpenGL, DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11
• Comprehensive use of tessellation technology
• Advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion)
• Volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm
• Dynamic simulation of changing environment with high physical fidelity
• Interactive experience with fly/walk-through modes
• ATI Eyefinity support

Download Unigine 'Heaven' DirectX 11 Benchmark (127 MB)

We suspected that AMD might wait until the Windows 7 launch date to release its regular monthly driver updates for its ATI Radeon graphics cards, and we were right. The Catalyst 9.10 drivers are now available for download from AMD's gaming web site.

The release notes for the new drivers give the 411 on what's new, improved and fixed in this release. One of the new features is a new anti-aliasing method called Super Sampling that AMD claims will improve image quality for its ATI Radeon HD 5800 graphics card (the only ones that currently support DirectX11) while still allowing for solid performance. There are also some bugs addressed for games like Ghostbusters and Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.

AMD has the current edge over its main rival Nvidia in the PC graphics card race. AMD's new DirectX11-based cards under their ATI brand are out now while Nvidia's DirectX11 cards are not expected to launch until sometime in early 2010. However, Nvidia is apparently prepping some kind of new graphics card product for a launch this fall.

This week Nvidia sent out invites for people to come to their Santa Clara, California offices on October 30 for a Halloween-themed launch event that will introduce "a rocking new graphics card designed by NVIDIA and EVGA to take PhysX to the next level." That's all we know at this point but if you happen to be in the area on that date there may still be time to send in your RSVP.

We are just days away from the launch of Windows 7 and the official launch of DirectX11. But maybe you don't want to spend hundreds of dollars to get one of those new AMD graphics cards that support DirectX11 features. Fear not, however, as AMD has just announced two new cards that are designed for the more budget minded PC gamer who still wants to have high end graphics.

The ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card (shown to the left) and the ATI Radeon HD 5750 card both support DirectX11 and early reviews from hardware sites indicate that both cards give a lot of performance bang for the buck. In this case the bucks come to between $109-$159. Meanwhile Nvidia still has yet to release their own DirectX11 card and likely won't be able to until sometime in 2010.

PC graphics chip maker Nvida held a big press event this week to introduce folks to what you see above. That is their all new GPU architecture that they have code-named "Fermi". With 512 CUDA cores inside, the technology behind the Fermi architecture will be the basis for the next generation of GeForce-based graphics cards.

Which is all well and good but where are those cards? As we reported recently rival AMD has begun shipping their own next-gen cards which are the first to have true DirectX11 support. HardOCP posts up a quote from Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang who states, " Nobody likes when the competition has a product. I don't like keeping our enthusiast waiting on our next generation processors. I would rather be shipping today, but we will ship when the product is ready to ship." However speculation on many hardware web sites state we may have to wait until sometime in the first quarter of 2010 before Nvidia has an actual shipping card with the Fermi technology. That gives AMD a pretty big head start.

Even though the official release of Windows 7 is still three weeks away or so, the very first PC game with support for the OS's new DirectX11 3D graphics API is already out there right now. And believe it or not it's BattleForge, the free-to-play fantasy RTS game from Electronic Arts and its developer EA Phenomic.

The patch to enable DirectX11 support was in fact released last week to its users and according to BattleForge's official web site the patch will allow the game to "have a higher frame rate and new ways of creating graphical effects, such as shadows and lighting" on DirectX11 based PCs. Of course, most players of the game won't notice the difference at all. That's because the DirectX11 support requires both Windows 7 to be installed (Windows Vista will also support DirectX11 but that support has yet to be enabled) and a DirectX11-based video card be a part of the gaming rig. At the moment only two video graphics chips support DirectX11 and they both come from AMD. Graphics cards based on the company's ATI Radeon HD 5870 chip went on sale just last week and cards based on the the ATI Radeon HD 5850 goon sale today.

They have been teasing us for some time but today AMD announced their first fully supported DirectX11 graphics card. The AMD RadeonHD 5800 series of graphics chips have up to up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power on just one card. It also has support for the recently announced ATI Eyefinity technology that will allow up to six monitors to be run on just one graphics card.

AMD will release two Radeon HD 5800 graphics cards at first. One is the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the other is the ATI Radeon HD 5850. Both will come with 1 GB of memory. The Radeon HD 5870 card is now available from several different graphics card companies with a price of $379.99