Some manufacturer also needs to do an AGP version for the really, really cheap bastard like me.

I'm not touching any sort of DirectX 10 video card or Windows Vista until Q4 of this year when the technology and drivers have gone through the early growing pains. But it is good to see new products coming out.

Whats with the memory size: 768, 640, 320? I miss the good old days of 512 and 256.

Are directx10 games going to need as much as 768mb of memory? How much is enough for crysis, unreal2007 and furture directx10 games?

I'll still wait for the die shrink, smaller PCB, and actual shipping DirectX 10 games that are, you know, good and stuff. Thanks anyway Nvidia.

640mb GTS cards have been running around $400 for a couple weeks now. You would think at that price no one who had seen benchmarks would touch a X1950XTX for more than $320 or so, but a big price drop hasn't happened and they're still $400 too.

It would be nice to think that a $300 near-GTS would push AMD's whole high end line down a hundred bucks but the previous example seems to illustrate there are enough stupid buyers out there that for the moment they won't have to.

:o) Sounds like a 9500Pro type card, great value to perf ratio. Hopefully it's going to be smaller as current 8800 sizing is plain stupid ... and I really want a quiet cooler too nVidia.

How about shaving an inch or so off the length of an 8800GTX so it'll fit in an Antec P180 or Nine Hundred without blocking HD spaces?

I don't know if it is totally a matter of component changes. Yes, the memory is cheaper (saving $35 or so bucks from the full meal deal), but I would imagine that most of the components are much the same. What we have to figure here is that the margins take a small hit. Plus I would imagine that several months now after the introductionof the 8800 series NVIDIA has hit some milestones with TSMC and the packaging company, and the actual G80 chips themselves are cheaper to produce, and therefore cheaper to sell to the AIB's.

halved memory = quartered price ? gah ! This is precisely the sort of thing that brings out the cheap bastard im me

Well, I'll consider this 1/2 RAM card if it performs better than 7900GS in SLI. If not, then it will be more cost effective for me to get a 2nd 7900GS.

And no, I don't give a flying f*** about DirectX 10. If I ever buy Vista, it'll be mid-to-late 2008 anyway.

I did a quick BOTE (back of the envelope) calculation on memory costs. 16Mx32 DDR3 chips are going for about $6.50 or $7 today for the 700Mhz speed grade. Doubtless, the 800Mhz speed grade costs a bit more. Let's just say $7.25. So with 10 chips on the board, it would cost about $72 for the video memory. 8Mx32 chips are going for about $4.50, although it's possible they could sell for $4 to the very large-sized customers (XFX, eVGA , MSI, ASUS etc. etc.). So that means $4*10 = $40 in memory cost. While it isn't quite 1/2 of what the 640MB cost, it does indicate that the $100 price drop comes from more than just reducing memory size/cost.

What they're doing is substituting 8Mx32 DDR3 memory for the more expensive 16Mx32 DDR3 memory. That does cut the total memory size in half, but the astute reader will recognize that there will be a small but quantifiable negative effect on memory efficiency (utilization of available peak bandwidth). The reason is that 16Mx32 DDR3 chips have 8 internal banks, while 8Mx32 chips have only 4 internal banks. With 8 banks available for the memory controller, it can have 8 banks open concurrently (for read and write accesses), as opposed to having only 4 banks open with the 8Mx32 chip.

Kick em while they are down, eh NVIDIA?

I'm waiting for the mid-range variant that is a bit shorter.

Bring it! Price drops and product segmentation (within reason) are always welcome.

I guess more good news for Nvidia fans. So if you run at a resolution < 1600x1200, I would image the drop off in memory is negligible. I have a tax return and birthday coming up, new monitor + video card? Mayhaps! :)