NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 55nm in mid-July

NVIDIA decides to put some more pressure on ATI by preparing a new mid-range graphics card, the GeForce 9800 GTX+. The name is a bit unusual but this card is NVIDIA's first 55nm part and it will be launched in mid-July, one week later than the Radeon HD 4870, for $229.

PC Perspective got the specifications of the GeForce 9800 GTX+:

Core clock: 738MHz

Shader clock: 1836MHz

512MB GDDR3 memory @ 2200 MHz

2- and 3-way SLI support

Compared to the current 65nm GeForce 9800 GTX this card has a 63MHz higher core, 148MHz higher clocked shaders but same memory clock. Furthermore, the price of the 65nm GeForce 9800 GTX will drop to $199 and there's also a rumour that NVIDIA is working on a performance driver to squeeze "significantly more" performance out of this 55nm G92 GPU.

Looks like it's going to become an interesting summer, we have a feeling this card may give the $199 Radeon HD 4850 and $299 4870 a kick in the ass but if the performance is too good it could cannibalize the sales of the GeForce GTX 260. The GeForce 9800 GTX+'s pricing will hit the sweet spot, the price/performance could be pretty good and I'm sure NVIDIA will point out the other advantages this card has like PhysX support and support for CUDA-accelerated applications like fast video transcoding.