We 'welcomed' NVIDIA's GeForce GTS 250 1GB card with more than a little head scratching. Basically a GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB card by another name, albeit with minor improvements and a slight price-drop to around £135 for a full-retail model.

ATI's moved pricing on its Radeon HD 4870 512MB, in the form of partner rebates, and we now see a Sapphire GPU selling for £143, leaving the GTS 250 1GB - especially partner-overclocked models - little wiggle room.

NVIDIA's realised this and has, this week, chopped the buy-in cost of GeForce GTS 250 GPUs, as well as taking a hammer to GeForce GTX 260's asking price.

XFX has already cottoned-on to this fact and released the Core range, on top of the value-orientated GeForce GTX 260 XT (216-core) that currently etails for around £162, including VAT.

Looking around the web, other partners have also cut pricing, especially on 192-core GTX 260 models that are in short supply. MSI's pre-overclocked version is available for £169.11, whilst Inno3D's is on pre-order for a staggering £134.99.

Appreciating these prices, we expect to see most partners' default-clocked GeForce GTX 260 (216-core) cards come down to between £150-£170 in the next fortnight or so.

GeForce GTS 250, too, sees a slight snip, coming in at around £110 for the 512MB card and £125 for the 1GB version.

In reality, nothing much has changed in terms of technology, but you can now buy either a Radeon HD 4870 1GB or GeForce GTX 260 (216-core) 896MB for around £165 - down from around £200 a month or so ago.

The price-drop will put pressure on Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce GTS 250 512MB pricing, and we may well see both dip below £100 real soon.