Aiming to hinder ATI's Radeon 4870 penetration of the high end graphics market, Nvidia introduced an improved version of their GTX 260 graphics card; but it seems that this plan might not be working as well as Nvidia hoped for.
The new design, dubbed GTX 260-216, retains the $299.99 price point but boasts 216 stream processing units, compared to original GTX 260 which includes 192 units only.
Unfortunately for the company, most of Nvidia's production partners decided not to follow their plan and replace the old GTX 260 graphics cards with the new design. Companies such as Asustek Computer, Gainward, MicroStar International and Leadtek just have too many GTX 260 graphic cards in stock. They also believe that increasing the number of stream processors wouldn't result in a significant performance boost without increasing other fixed function execution units as well.
