Well, it appears as though AMD are looking to launch their next-gen high-end GPUs as soon as early-2013 with some out of this world naming. The top end cards will arrive as the Radeon HD 8970 and HD 8950 with codenames of Venus XT and Venus Pro, respectively.

These cards will sport no less than 5.1 billion transistors, include 3GB of RAM and sport a 384-bit memory bus. There's no bandwidth numbers just yet, but they should be pushing out some serious digits - those 5.1 billion transistors are going to be cranking along very nicely. KitGuru are reporting that we should see the Radeon HD 8970 unveiled at CeBIT in March, with a full launch at Computex a few months later in June.

The new GPUs are ahead of schedule, giving AMD some power to release a product if NVIDIA comes out with a surprise between now and then. You can also see on the chart above that there's a dual-GPU teased, the Radeon HD 8990 - now that will be a monster if I've ever seen one. We're talking 10.2 billion transistors worth of GPU goodness right there, enough to get the pants rising on any enthusiast.