AMD's major video chipset update this fall has had its feature set and release date uncovered thanks to a slip of information Monday. The ATI Radeon HD 5800 series should be fronted by the 5850 and 5870, both high-end cards that could be the first to support Eyefinity, a technology that not unlike Matrox cards will support three displays on a single card. They are also to be AMD's first graphics cores to support DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.1 visual effects in hardware.

Both the cards mentioned by VR-Zone should come with 1GB of GDDR5 video memory and will support most of AMD's other high-end features, including general-purpose computing through either DirectX 11, OpenCL or AMD's own Stream format. Either should handle video decoding, encoding and transcoding in hardware as well as handle CrossFire X for multi-card systems.

If on track, the 5850 and 5870 will both have a formal unveiling in September and will ship in October, just weeks after the release of the OpenCL-supporting Mac OS X Snow Leopard and ahead of the launch of Windows 7.