I nothing in detail about the prices and still no exact release date. arg... well i'm poor anyway so I hope to have enough dough by the time they get on the shelf. :-p

It either the 2600XT or the x1950pro... ... cant wait for the benchmarks!

2600 has chips to perform HD decoding on the fly without taxing the CPU. Allowing even older PC 1080P.

Nuff said no comparison...

If it is as capable as you said about taking the load from CPU to GPU on video decoding, I may have to upgrade.

But doesn't the Nvidia 8600 capable of the same thing already?

When AMD finally gets back in the game, my stock will go up. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here on an Intel CPU & Nvidia GPU remaining fully unloyal while they sort themselves out internally... >_>

Great! I can't wait to see some numbers. The prices will be competitive for sure but will these cards beat NVIDIA's offerings in terms of performance? They should because the 8600 and 8400 are a bit anemic when compared to the high-end 8800 series.

Even the nVidia's 6600 series can do HD decoding that removes the load from the CPU. Although nVidia claims to support H.264 with the 6600, I hear there are problems with that and therefore you need to get into the 7 series. There maybe some extra eye candy in the 8 series cards, but nothing I've seen worth going to.

The 8600 can do the same thing but only if you have vista. The XP drivers haven't been worked on by nvidia. Can't understand why not since it had a 7 month head start. ATI's drivers suck as well.

I'd hold off on the upgrade for now, these are all stop gaps. These early releases are really not worth it now. Either the card has good HD movie playing or HD game playing. Hold out for both in one card before the upgrade. Nvidia has a new card as the 8800 is now old and was pre-mature.

You can read the review here at Toms
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/06/08/avivo_vs_purevideo_hd/

and there are other reviews as well.

instead of the new low/mid end 8 and HD series

its cheaper, and they perform better in XP :D