Up until very recently, Nvidia was the market leader in discrete GPU sales. That was the case for quite awhile. Nvidia is generally more well-known to the casual consumer (in my experience), and they have more bells and whistles with their cards and drivers. For example, Nvidia supports CUDA and Physx, which aren't of much use to most people, but they're good marketing tools. For the most part Nvidia has had the fastest cards on the market.. that is until recently. Now ATI has the fastest overall card (5970). Nvidia recently brought out the excellent bang for the buck GTX 460, which is the first product from the GTX 400 series that most reviewers are really recommending versus their ATI counterparts. In the last year, ATI has released the very well-reviewed, excellent performing 5000 series cards, which have taken a massive chunk out of Nvidia's customer base (myself included).
So, in short.. Nvidia was the "big dog" and market share leader for discrete GPU sales until recently, so they could afford to be a little bit more expensive. Now with the relative failure of their Fermi (GTX 400) line of products, they've fallen out of the top spot, and may have to change their pricing. I wouldn't be shocked to see a big price drop on Nvidia's current lineup, or if that doesn't happen.. maybe they will have the cheaper product lineup next round. For this round they have to be counting on the GTX 460 to save their butts, since it seems to be the lone "diamond in the rough" of their current product line. One thing's for sure- Nvidia can't afford another round like this. They went from having a sizeable market share lead over ATI before the HD5000 series release, to trailing. That's a position they're not used to being in. As a consumer, I'd like to see their next series of cards be a big success.
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