We can confirm that today at an AMD place in Sunnyvale we had a chance to see DirectX 11 card, up and running.  We had one in our hands on one of the cards and we’ve seen one running a few DirectX 11 technology demos. So DirectX 11 hardware from ATI is real and not a Power Point presentation. 

The card is a prototype and it will probably launch later this year. So far, everyone keeps calling the card Evergreen. However, we insist in calling the card RV870 and we can tell you that this should be a performance card, not a cheap one.

From what we’ve seen, it can do tessellation and few other tricks from the DirectX 11 SDK kit. The general idea is that ATI is definitely ahead of introducing DirectX 11 hardware and this one is ought to be a 40nm chip. We don’t know about the general performance, it’s still too early for 3Dmark scores.