Many of you on a tight budget will be glad to know that NVIDIA plan to release some cheaper GeForce 8800 series cards in mid to late feb, meaning DX10 goodness without the big $$$ laid out.

VR-Zone have learned that the lower-end 8800 variant will still be dubbed an 8800 GTS with the same clock speeds etc. - The only difference lies in the amount of memory onboard, halved from 640MB to 320MB (still more than enough for kickarse smooth gaming).

The best bit? Undoubtedly the US$299 price tag :D

VR-Zone has learned that NVIDIA will release cheaper GeForce 8800 cards next month to increase pressure on current ATi X1950 lineup targeting at X1950XT 256MB mainly. The new cards will based on the same 8800GTS GPU (96 unified, 24 texture processors and 20 ROPs). It has the same core and memory clock speeds but half the memory size of the current 8800GTS cards. The card will still be known as GeForce 8800GTS but comes with 320MB GDDR3 memories in 10 x 8M*32 array so the memory bus width remains unchanged at 320bit. The card length is the same as the current 8800GTS card at 9 inches and it is still a dual slot. The performance is close to the current 8800GTS 640M but it is US$100 cheaper. Does a price tag of US$299 sounds good to you?