A common feature with shopping seasons, namely summer and Christmas, is that consumer graphics giants, AMD and NVIDIA announce new products that push up the pure performance and performance per dollar envelopes. With this Christmas season however, nothing notably new is going to come out of their stables, making their existing products slog it out. This resulted in both companies resorting to some serious price-cutting with their existing mid-thru-high-end products.

In the wake of massive price-cuts by NVIDIA for the GeForce GTX 260, AMD has decided to prepare its own price-cuts for the one card that goes neck and neck with the GTX 260, Radeon HD 4870. Originally seated in the $299~$399 bracket, the GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 have become some of the key SKUs for both companies. These are the products we have seen going neck and neck, resulting in both companies refreshing them, and later resorting to price-cuts. NVIDIA refreshed GeForce GTX 260 with a 216 stream processor version that came with added shader compute power, while AMD responded with the 1 GB variant of the Radeon HD 4870. As on today, the company pricing for the Radeon HD 4870 has been set around US $199 for the 512 MB and $239 for the 1 GB variants. This roughly catches up with the pricing for GeForce GTX 260, with roughly $199~$219 for the 192 stream processor and $239~$249 for the 216 stream processor variant.