NVIDIA announces GeForce GTX 770 for under $400, says it's faster than last year's GTX 680

It probably won't come as a huge surprise, given the GTX 780's appearance last week, but today's launch of the GTX 770 nevertheless brings us a very interesting product. The card is claimed to be about five percent faster than last year's much more expensive flagship, the GTX 680, thanks to faster memory (7Gb/s instead of 6Gb/s), a slightly higher base clock speed (1,046 vs. 1,006MHz) and an equivalent number of CUDA cores (1,536). Seeing as how the the GTX 680 still holds its own with current games, this performance parity strikes us as something of a deal -- assuming independent benchmarks back it up. We're awaiting a confirmed US price, but we'll eat our SATA cables if it's anything other than $399 for a 2GB model (the press release just says "under $400"). UK and European prices match those of theGTX 670 (£329 inc. VAT, 329 euros exc. VAT), and availability begins today. Check out NVIDIA's slide deck for more details, including power consumption and noise, SLI scaling (which looks healthy) and some in-house frame rate comparisons against other products.