The power draw decrease could be impressive. That's the only major stumbling block for ATi right now, I wonder how their refresh will do in that department. It's going to be on the same process but I'm assuming optimized in ways yet looking at the clock speed increases it looks like ATi has traded any power savings for more speed. The RV775Pro, if it has those memory speeds though, will be a notable increase over the RV770Pro, I wonder where the HD4870 will fall though, the 512MB models are getting damn cheap.

The idle power of ATi cards is most bothersome, Powerplay doesn't work too well when it can't tell the difference between Aero desktop and a real 3D app and speeds up clocks for Aero and slows down clocks during games.

My 8800GT is old, but no clear winner has arrived. I tasted some faster with the 4850, but it wasn't enough. I wanted the 4870, but now NV is cheaper and the waters have muddied. Maybe this GTX285 will come in 10% faster, a bunch cooler and quieter, and still hit the current GTX280 price point (~300$-350$ retail, with sales+promos down to occasional 275$). That would be pretty irresistible to me.

Still no GDDR5 and a 512 bit bus to increase the cost for no benefit, when GDDR5 has been around for months, has doubled in speed, and chip prices have gone down the toilet...

Boy Nvidia, you're really going places lately! I figured this would be the 8800GTX to 8800GT transition, but I guess that would only make sense.

What's next? A 40nm shrink of the 9800GT just after they get around to renaming it for the 3rd time? There may be a recession and things may be sucking for them, but that's not an excuse to practically just give up. This is when everyone should be creating innovative ways to keep costs down, and this, once again, is pretty much the total opposite.

How about this ATI HD 5870 coming this January 900Mhz core, 840sp, 48TMUs plus other improvements.

http://www.hardware-infos.com/news.php?news=2579
http://www.expreview.com/news/hard/2008-12-12/1229072147d10842.html

This GTX285 cant beat it again... =p bye nvidia, make your GPU priced lower than ATI then we buy your products

No wonder XFX is going to ATI next year
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1...

Holy crap, a new name for the dieshrunk GPU?!? Hell hath frozen over.

"However, the future card will have higher stock clock speeds, and it will supposedly reduce top power consumption from 236W to just 183W."

Oh, so coming in direct contact with the GPU heatsink will only cause second degree burns now, instead of third degree burns! We are saved! :P

But seriously, 183W still sounds ridiculously high to me. My entire desktop computer probably consumes less than that!

And for the record, this is not an nVidia flame, just an expression of my utter shock at recent GPU trends. I know high-end ATi/AMD cards are not much better in this regard.

!0% faster than old is not enough. 4870 x 2 is faster than 10%

Just a GTX280 replacement, nothing too exciting.

Speaking of single-GPU crown, why can't they release one of these on a PCB shorter than 10.5" so it's more feasible to run one in a normal-sized case? Yes, they'd need to drop an SLI connector -- heck, or both. But with a more reasonable power draw in the new models, even using one in a SFF chassis might be feasible if it weren't quite so long. And most of those motherboards won't support SLI anyway (due to licensing issues if not a lack of PCIe slots).

Too bad that HD 4670/ Geforce 9500 and HD 4850/ Geforce 9800GXT+ make it practically useless for the majority of the market.

I think it was pretty much a given that this new card would overtake the GTX 280, but what will be the price? Will it have a better price per dollar than the current nvidia offerings? I wonder if that 10% is actually outperform by that number in ideal situations.

I expect the 65nm cards to drop and price and fade away as stock runs out. They probably stopped making them awhile ago.