Oh boy, it really seems that the war in the desktop GPU segment is about to move to a whole new phase, since the first spyshots of AMD's upcoming Radeon graphics cards have started to make their way online, with the Radeon HD 6870 being the first to be exposed online.

The respective photo has been posted on a Chinese website (not a surprise, really, since that's where most of the other such leaks typically originate) called it.com.cn, and says quite a few things not only about the design of the future card, but also some of its features.

As some of you can remember, this is not the first leak related to the forthcoming AMD Radeon GPUs from the “Southern Islands” series, the specs for future HD 6750 and HD 6770 graphics cards, set to be officially unveiled at some point in October, also making their way online.

Anyway, coming back to the model at hand, we should also note that the HD 6870 will be powered by the 40nm Barts (XT) GPU and will feature DirectX 11 support.

The 2-slot card will come packed with some pretty impressive hardware, including here a 256-bit memory interface, 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM, the third-generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD), AMD HD3D technology for 3D gaming, CrossFireX support, and the Eyefinity multi-monitor solution.

In fact, as far as Eyefinity is concerned, the future GPU's got all its bases covered, since it provides no less than five display outputs - two DVI, one HDMI 1.4, two mini DisplayPort 1.2.

Oh well, the photo and the specs paint a pretty interesting picture for the forthcoming GPU model, so all we can do right now is wait for it and hope that we'll have the opportunity to test them first-hand.