As the launch of AMD's highly anticipated Radeon HD 4870 X2 nudges ever closer, Fudzilla claim to have found out what the retail pricing will be on these cards.

Apparently the HD 4870 X2 with 2GB of GDDR5 will hit retail shelves at $549 USD during the second half of August. In retrospect, NVIDIA has lowered pricing of the GTX 280 to around $500 USD to help soften the blow when R700 hits. But AMD's card does still look a lot more appealing; at just $50 more you're getting double the GPUs, double the memory, and supposedly up to 80% better performance than the GTX 280 (according to this brief report over at HARDSPELL).

NVIDIA does however have another counter-attack method up its sleeve, though things are still a little sketchy as to what this will be exactly. There has recently been quite a bit of talk relating to a 55nm GT200b chip on the horizon, but this latest report from HARDSPELL suggests the graphics giant is now scrapping the idea in favour of something even more serious; a 45nm GT300 processor. Supposed specs of this upcoming card include DX10.1 support, 384 shader units, 1GB of GDDR5 memory at 4GHz and the core running at 800MHz with 2GHz shader clock.

Apparently NVIDIA also intend for this card to take on the successor to R700; what is currently referred to as the Super-RV770. No matter what happens, it's safe to say the graphics card industry has never looked so hot; now and into the foreseeable future.