The pricing debate here made me curious. The last two cards I have bought before my current one were a Geforce4 Ti 4400 for around $330 and a Geforce2 for just under $300. Here is what I found with some googling. It's called boiling a frog. The Riva 128 could be had for about $130.
here you can see the TNT2 Ultra, a summer 1999 refresh of the TNT2 selling on release for only $180. In
this firingsquad review you can see that the first geforce cards with DDR ram were selling at $299 MSRP. These were the top end Asus cards at that time (12/99) and Creative was selling a geforce 256 DDR card for $250. Here is
a nice comparison chart from tomshardware that gives a good idea for prices at the start of 2000. I still have my Elsa Erazor X2 which was selling for just under $300. Again, state of the art and arguably the best brand at the time. It was not until the Geforce2 Ultra at $500 MSRP that we started to get a hint of current pricing. It was rumoured that such pricing was simply to compete against the
$600 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000. and indeed
here you can see a geforce3 for $280 (street price) in 09/2001. And by the end of 2001 you can see that the top of the line Nvidia card,
the geforce3 Ti 500 had an MSRP of $350. In 2002 the bar was raised again with
the geforce4 Ti 4600 selling for just under $400. By summer 2003, we are again back to an MSRP of $499 for the top end card,
geforce FX 5900 Ultra. This was replaced in October with the FX 5950, again at the $499 price point. Fast forward to the summer refresh of 2004 and we have the 6800 Ultra at $499 again. Although the non-ultra 6800 GT could be had for
just under $400. By the end of 2005 Nvidia is selling the
geforce 7800 GTX 512 for $700. And that is the street price at the time. By spring of 2006, the
7900 GTX is released at $499. Then in November of 2006 the ever famous and still king of graphics cards, the 8800 GTX was released at just over $600. So it set a new record for both perforrmance and for cost. Although the 8800 ultra had an MSRP of $829, it soon dropped to about $700 probably due to the fact that no one was buying them. I wonder if Nvidia was testing the waters to see how much people would really be willing to pay for a top end graphics card. It seems like they were trying to go for a similar pricing strategy to Intel, with the fastest product costing a huge premium.