We've had an engineering sample kicking around here for a while. It is computationally very fast (blows anything from ATI/AMD out of the water), although the memory bandwidth hasn't had quite the same improvement. For graphics this means fancier effects (distortions, caustics and whatnot) and the card will finally have the horsepower to drive lots of truly dynamic geometry (not just the occasional rag-doll). So more realistic animations. But the level of photorealism isn't going to be substantially higher because the internal bandwidth for processing textures hasn't increased. So per frame the card can do more with the data it has available, but it won't be able to process substantially more data and textures per frame than the G80/G92 could. One interesting thing is there's hardware support for full asynchronous transfers now, and PCI express 2.0 support, so streaming data onto the card will be easier and faster. It should be easier to develop engines for open world/large maps, since one of the major reasons for map transitions is gone.
Lots of other cool features too. :-)
In regards to price/performance, the first hardware of a new generation is always extremely expensive. Improvements in process and the inevitable die shrink will lower the price substantially (as it did with the G80- the 8800 was about $800 when it was first released).
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