The GeForce GTX 280 served as NVIDIA's flagship graphics accelerator for long enough. While it may not have retained the performance crown for too long, it certainly did offer a great product for its price and thermal characteristics post R700. With two new avant-grade accelerators in the form of GeForce GTX 295 and GeForce GTX 285, NVIDIA seems to have sensed that it needs to let the market digest current inventories of the GeForce GTX 280 to create favourable shelf-space for the new products.

It has been noted on Newegg.com, a leading online retailer, that price-cuts have been injected across brands for the GeForce GTX 280. The card is now available for as low as US $314.99 for the MSI N280GTX-T2D1G OC (a factory overclocked card) with prices of reference-design cards staying below $360 for most of the available products. Leading vendors such as BFGTech, EVGA, and Zotac have placed their base models around the $320 range with factory overclocked models ranging around the $350 mark. The GeForce GTX 280 will be suceeded by the GeForce GTX 285 that is expected to launch on 15th January, which sports a refreshed G200b graphics processor built on the 55nm manufacturing process and running at higher clock speeds. NVIDIA has resorted to similar price-cuts for its GeForce GTX 260 graphics accelerator to serve two purposes: making the product attractive during the crucial Christmas shopping season, and to digest inventories for the 55nm GeForce GTX 260 launch.