Nvidia Corp., a leading developer of graphics processing units (GPUs) has quietly slashed pricing of its latest GeForce GTX 200 product family in an attempt to sustain its market share and not let ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, gain traction in the market.

Presently large stores in the USA sell Nvidia GeForce GTX 260-based graphics cards for the price that starts at $299, whereas the higher-end GeForce GTX 280 costs from $499 and upwards. Previously such graphics cards cost $100 - $150 more and the slash is rather unprecedented since the GPU developer has launched its GTX 200-series less than a month ago.

Nvidia needs to cut prices of its products to better compete against ATI Radeon HD 4000-series graphics cards from its arch-rival. However, it is not completely clear whether the company actually sells its Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 at a profit since both GTX 260 and 280 are very expensive to manufacture.

The new Nvidia GeForce GTX 200-series graphics cards are based on the code-named G200 graphics processor that features 240 unified shader processing processors (SPs, stream processors) , 80 texture units (TUs, 80 texture address, 80 texture filtering units), 32 render back ends (RBEs) as well as 512-bit memory controller. The fresh breed of graphics processors also features double-precision floating point support, re-designed thread dispatch processor, PCI Express 2.0 support and some other tweaks. Like the predecessors, the GTX 200-series is DirectX 10 compatible and features hardware acceleration and post-processing of high-definition video playback as well as other capabilities. The new graphics chip consists of 1.4 billion transistors and is manufactured using 65nm process technology at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. Since the developer could not fit output interface into the G200 chip possibly due to transistor budget, graphics boards powered by the GPU will be equipped with a new version of the NV IO controller that supports D-Sub, dual-link DVI, DisplayPort, TV-Out and other interfaces.

Nvidia and its add-in-board partners sell two versions of the GeForce GTX 200: the premium-class GTX 280 with 240 SPs, 80 TUs, 32 RBEs and 1GB of GDDR3 memory connected using 512-bit interface as well as high-end GTX 260 with 192 SPs, 64 TUs, 28 RBEs and 896MB of GDDR3 memory connected using 448-bit interface. The GeForce GTX 280 has GPU clocked at 602MHz, SPs operating at 1296MHz and memory working at 2214MHz, whereas the GeForce GTX 260 is clocked at 576MHz, 1242MHz and 1998MHz, respectively.

Nvidia did not comment on the news-story.