Nvidia today urgently informed their partners about the corrections made to their last generation G92 based single-chip solutions line-up, because they were expecting the competition in the mainstream segment to get more aggressive. First of all, they reduced the recommended prices on their GeForce 9800 GTX solution that will now be available for $199. A newer modification of this graphics card, GeForce 9800 GTX+, will be competing against the new Radeon HD 4850. According to the report on Tweaktown site, the new solution will have its chip frequency increased from 675/1688MHz to 738/1836MHz. As a result, GTX+ model should be about 10% faster than the regular GeForce 9800 GTX. GeForce 9800 GTX+ should supposedly be available in the market for something around $229 retail price.

In related news, NVIDIA's just-announced-yesterday GeForce 9800 GTX+ has already been used and abused for your satisfaction, and the chaps over at PC Perspective have the benchmarks to prove it:

This is kind of surprising - the 9800 GTX+ actually is using MORE power than the 9800 GTX original card. This tells me that NVIDIA basically "wiped out" any power advantages and savings they got with the 55nm product by pushing the clocks up to improve performance. Obviously I was expecting these results to be quite different, with the power savings and performance improvement for the new G92b over G92.

In our first Radeon HD 4850 512MB preview we decided that it was a great performing card for the money - with an MSRP of $199, the then-$269-priced 9800 GTX wasn't nearly as attractive. Since then though NVIDIA has decided to cut the prices on the original While I am really not a fan of doing these "rough cut" previews of products, the schedules from AMD and NVIDIA more or less dictated it for this instance. The joy of launch dates and changes is something I wish upon no one. We did get some interesting information from it all though - the AMD Radeon HD 4850 and the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ appear to be nearly equally matched in price and performance. We will have our FULL reviews of the HD 4850, HD 4870 and GeForce 9800 GTX+ cards in the coming week with many more games, benchmarks and hopefully some updated information on pricing and availability of all of these parts