It's more the fact that AMD, when they released the HD 4870/50 said they were back on a 6 month refresh cycle for the higher end cards. I would like to buy another 4850 and Crossfire them, but why should I when the HD 5000 series is due any time now and is rumored to bring at least 25% more performance (and that rumor is not worth a grain of salt) and finally doing away with -very- old GDDR3 for all but the lowest models. But I think the biggest reason is to be able to keep the heat on nVidia.
Now don't get me wrong, I DO NOT want to see another fiasco like in the opening weeks of the HD 4850/70 which had no official driver support and were (and some like he 4870 x2 still are) full of bugs and glitches. Like I said, it seems very suspicious that Catalyst 9.1 is so late (actually it is NOT on the drivers page as of this post, it says Catalyst 9.1 but the files are all Catalyst 8.12) and so little has been heard of the HD 5000.
Following a successful run with the codenamed R700 family of GPUs, which was originally released back in June 2008 as the Radeon HD 4000 series, AMD is launching the highly anticipated R800. Debuting to no one's surprise as the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series, on our test bed today we have a reference HD 5870 graphics card packing some 2150 million transistors and produced on a 40nm process.
The new Radeon HD 5000 series is said to deliver around 2x more performance than previous generation Radeon cards, and brings DirectX 11 support to desktops for the first time. Even while Nvidia is downplaying the latter, AMD sees it as a great advantage and expects DX11-capable games to start shipping before the end of the year.
Nvidia will also support DirectX 11 on future hardware of course, but the way things are going it looks as though we'll still have to wait a few months before their response to the new Radeon HD line arrives.
AMD's pricing strategy with the Radeon HD 5000 series will be quite interesting too, as for the first time in a long while the company will be looking to take the performance crown from Nvidia. Previous generation ATI graphics cards have been unable to compete with the fastest Nvidia solutions, forcing AMD to heavily discount their products in an effort to deliver better value.
In the end the Radeon HD 4850 was competing with the much older GeForce 9800 GTX, while the Radeon HD 4870 ran somewhat unopposed at $299. At this price point the 4870 delivered an impressive level of performance, though it was overshadowed by improved GeForce GTX graphics cards over the next 12 months.
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