Conclusions
AMD has succeeded in bringing DirectX 11 under the $100 mark with the Radeon HD 5670, and for the money, this is a very capable little graphics card. Aside perhaps from Borderlands, the 5670 ran all of our games smoothly at 1680x1050 with antialiasing and detail levels cranked up. Gamers on tight budgets shouldn't require much more performance than that. Also, because it's based on AMD's latest architecture, this newcomer may perform better than its predecessors in GPU-compute applications—another selling point that could gain importance in the not-too-distant future.

Compared to the GeForce GT 240, the most similar design Nvidia offers right now, the new Radeon looks to be faster overall. Sometimes by quite a bit.

Nvidia's recent pricing moves do put the Radeon HD 5670 up against the GeForce 9800 GT, as well. As we noted earlier, the 9800 GT likely offers higher overall performance, but it has the downside of being older, larger, hungrier for power—and, since it's a 55-nm, DX10-only part, probably not long for this world.

If you want higher performance without having to compromise on the feature set, we would direct you another Radeon instead. For a little over $50 more, AMD offers the Radeon HD 5770 1GB, a considerably faster product capable of running every new game out there at a 1080p resolution. Not a bad trade up for about the price of a game. That price difference might make the 5770 too big a leap for the most cash-strapped among us, and casual gamers probably shouldn't bother. Still, anyone with a 1080p monitor really ought to consider stepping up.

As a side note, the relative strength of the Radeon HD 5670 bodes well for AMD's new, notebook-bound Mobility Radeon HD 5700 and 5600 GPUs. AMD based those parts on the same Redwood chip, although it lowered speeds slightly to 650MHz for the GPU and 3.2Gbps for the memory. Nevertheless, Redwood's mobile incarnation seems like it could deliver great gaming performance at notebook-friendly resolutions, hopefully without forcing users to lug around a big, bulky laptop.