AMD's got two new 28nm video cards today, the AMD Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition and the 7750. Compared to top-tier cards, they're pretty darn affordable, but not without a few concessions.
The 7770 is the first graphics card with a 1GHz GPU that's not simply overclocked, according to AMD. And compared to some other budget-busters, it's pretty affordable at $159. But for all the clockspeed, it came in middle-of-the-pack compared to still-more-expensive cards in AnandTech's benchmarks. That's very impressive company, but fastest clock doesn't necessarily mean best.
Meanwhile, the $109 800MHz 7750 isn't clocked nearly as fast, but it also doesn't need its own power connector, and can run gaming-level performance at the very-low 75W power consumption. That's very, very efficient. The 7700 line will be followed by some beefier cards, probably pretty soon, but it's a nice surprise that the budget-friendly cards of this generation are here sooner rather than later. [MaximumPC, AnandTech]