NVIDIA has held  a dominant position in the high-end GPU space ever since the introduction of the G80 architecture back in November of 2006.  When the G80 first arrived in the form of the GeForce 8800 GTX and the pared-down GeForce 8800 GTS, the cards were clearly superior to anything else at the time in terms of both performance and features.  As time has passed, rival ATI has closed the gap somewhat with the Radeon HD 3800 series, and has even surpassed NVIDIA in some ways, for example with  DX10.1 and native HDMI with audio support, but through it all NVIDIA offered enthusiast gamers what they arguably desired most – high performance.  And it shows in the discreet graphics card market share data.

NVIDIA eventually refreshed their product line-up with the 65nm G92 GPU, which incorporated support for their PureVideo HD video processing engine with some texture processing tweaks thrown in for good measure as well, but the G92 didn’t offer significantly more performance than G80.  In reality, cards based on the G92, like the GeForce 9800 GTX, were actually inferior in some ways.  With today’s launch of their GT200 GPU, however, NVIDIA has truly taken things to the extreme.  While the GT200 does borrow heavily from previous generation GPU architectures, it is simply in a class of its own at the moment.  And as you’ll see, the jump in performance is similar to what we’ve all gotten use to and experienced again, when the GeForce 8800 GTX was first introduced.

• http://hothardware.com/articles/NVIDIA_GeForce_GTX_280_and_GTX_260_Unleashed/