NVIDIA Corp. recently announced that it had slashed recommended pricing on its GeForce 6800-series of products. Effective from now on, all of the GeForce 6800-series based graphics cards with standard configuration are $100 more affordable, which puts additional pressure on rival ATI Technologies, who struggles to deliver its next-generation breed of visual processing units.

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics card now have recommended price of $399, GeForce 6800 GT model should cost $299, whereas the GeForce 6800 has manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $199. The price slash came after NVIDIA introduced its GeForce 7800 GT at $449 price-point that delivers significantly higher speed in games compared to the GeForce 6800 Ultra as well as competing RADEON X850-series graphics products from ATI.

NVIDIA GeForce 6800-series of graphics processors is NVIDIA’s second-generation DirectX 9.0-supporting chips that also feature modern technologies like Shader Model 3.0, HDR and multi-GPU SLI. All GeForce 6800 graphics processing units sport 256-bit memory bus as well as 16 or 12 pixel pipelines, which ensures robust performance in demanding games and professional applications.

ATI Technologies also offer graphics cards at the mentioned price-points, however, the RADEON X800- and X850-series products at the same price-points with NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 do not offer similar functionality and performance to match the competing products, according to performance tests.

It is unclear whether ATI would also slash the pricing of its RADEON X8 product range.