Call it one of the immediate repercussions of NVIDIA's Monday launch of the GeForce GTX 460, AMD has responded covertly with noticeable price-cuts for the ATI Radeon HD 5830 graphics card, from across various AIB partners. Leading partners such as Sapphire, HIS, and Gigabyte positioned their models that have AMD-reference clock speeds at US $199.99, and factory-overclocked models starting at $229.99. Incidentally these are two price-points NVIDIA is targeting with the GeForce GTX 460, with the 768 MB variant positioned at $199.99, which NVIDIA refers to as the gamers' sweet-spot, and the 1 GB variant at $229.99.
Reviews from across the web show that while GeForce GTX 460 768MB gets close to the Radeon HD 5830 in terms of performance, it only takes the 1 GB variant to perform on par. With AMD positioning the HD 5830 at $199, and factory-overclocked HD 5830 starting at $229.99, things could get heated up in this market segment. Based on the 40 nm Cypress GPU, the Radeon HD 5830 is DirectX 11 compatible, packs 1120 stream processors, and 1 GB of GDDR5 memory.