AMD revealed today that it will be releasing new Radeon desktop GPUs "from top to bottom" in 2013, though you won't be seeing the next-gen Radeon 8000 series graphics cards until late in the year. Instead, the company will be firmly focused on the Radeon 7000 series cards currently available on the market for the first half of 2013, company officials told journalists during a conference call.

That doesn't mean that AMD will be sitting on its heels until the holidays, however. Officials said we can expect to see some new 7000-series GPUs released during the first half of the year, though they wouldn't provide any juicy details beyond that.

Why stick with a generation of graphics cards that was first introduced more than a year ago, at the finish line of 2011? AMD officials say that their current Radeon 7000 series has GPU leadership over Nvidia's GTX GeForce 600 series in terms of performance—especially given the recent launch of the beastly Asus Ares II, which sports dual Radeon 7970 GPUs and 6GB of RAM. Also, despite its long-ago launch, the Radeon 7000 series is actually gaining traction. AMD says that the Radeon HD 7000 series' January 2013 sales volumes were higher at any point in 2012, including the holiday season.

"With sales volumes continuing to ramp, it would be premature to launch a new series," officials said.

PCWorld