Nvidia Quietly Reduces Pricing of Performance Mainstream Graphics Board.
Nvidia Quietly Drops Price on GeForce GTX 460 768MB Graphics Card
[09/09/2010 03:54 PM]
by Anton Shilov
Nvidia Corp. has confirmed the evident price drop on the GeForce GTX 460 768MB graphics card. The board, which manufacturer suggested retail price at launch several weeks ago was $199 can now be obtained for $179 or even $169 in several online stores in the U.S. The move should further popularize the already successful product.
The back-to-school season traditionally increases demand for video games and various hardware and accessories for them, including graphics cards. As a result, in order to capture additional market share, address new markets and also get prepared for a roll-out of new product, Nvidia and its partners decided to lower the price onto the GeForce GTX 460 768MB graphics card, which performance level is between more expensive ATI Radeon HD 5830 and ATI Radeon HD 5850.
Until Nvidia releases new mainstream solutions based on another graphics processign unit with lowered performance and price, the GeForce GTX 768MB at $179 will be the most affordable graphics solution powered by a Fermi-class DirectX 11-supporting graphics chip.
The price drop not only shows Nvidia's aggressive approach and plan to recapture the lost market share, but it also means that the company now has more functional GF104 graphics chips and can initiate a price-war. Still, since the die-sizes of GF104 and ATI Cypress (which powers models 5830, 5850, 5870, 5970, etc) chips are pretty similar, it is clear that neither Nvidia nor ATI, graphics business unit of AMD, will lower their MSRPs too aggressively.
Nvidia GF104 graphics processing unit (GPU) powers GeForce GTX 460-series graphics cards with 1GB or 768MB of onboard GDDR5 memory. Called “the gamers’ sweet spotâ€, the GeForce GTX 460 graphics chip sports 336 stream processors (configured as 48 SPs per streaming multiprocessor), 56 texture units, 7 polymorph engines for tessellation as well as 24 (for 768MB version) or 32 (for 1GB ) render back ends. Just like the other members of the GeForce GTX 400-series family, the novelties support such proprietary technologies as CUDA-accelerated software, 3D Vision stereo-3D output and PhysX engine for processing of physics effects in select video games.
