Santa Clara (CA) - With the new GTX200 series out the gate, Nvidia is ready to transition its 9800 GPU family into more affordable price regions. Nvidia claims that the new card will beat its direct competitor, AMD’s upcoming Radeon HD 4850 in popular game and physics benchmarks.

All signs are pointing towards a price war in the mainstream segment around $200 between AMD/ATI and Nvidia. Following previous information that the Radeon HD 4850 will debut in the $200 - $230 price segment later this month, Nvidia today announced that it is dropping the recommended price for its 9800 GTX design to $199 and introduce a new 9800 GTX+ version with 512 MB of GDDR3 memory, also based on the G92 core, for $229.

The new GPU comes with a core clock of 1836 MHz and a memory clock of 738 MHz. Nvidia highlighted that physics support (based on Ageia’s original PhysX engine that has been integrated into CUDA) is supported by both the 9800 GTX and GTX+ through the driver version 177.39. With PhysX enabled, Nvidia claims that the physics simulation in the 3D Mark Vantage benchmark gains about 7.5x in performance and provides more than six times the performance of AMD’s Radeon 4850.

The company also claims to have an advantage in overall gaming performance in Crysis, Call of Duty 4, world in Conflict, ET: Quake Wars, Oblivion, Lost Planet, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Stalker.