Where does nVidia go after the 4870x2?

AMD/ATI recently launched the 4870X2. It's basically two 4870's on one physical card. Benchmarks show that it totally outperforms nVidia's flagship GTX280. Which begs the question: what was nVidia thinking when it launched the GTX280? When launched it was almost always outperformed by the 9800GX2. It only beat the 9800GX2 with AA turned on at high res. Not to mention the initial price of $650. This untimely launch by nVidia has seen it lose the crown to ATI after almost two years. The last I think time ATI was on top was with the x1950XT.

In all this mess, does there lie any salvation for nVidia?? Yes there does. CUDA works amazingly fast with the new GT200 core. CUDA based Applications are springing up pretty fast and they work really well. Also 3 way SLI with GTX280 is still the fastest solution commercially available for gaming.

Where does nVidia go from here? Well I don't see nVidia being able to put anything more on the GTX280. What would be a good idea though would be a 9800gx2 2GB Edition. The main problem with the 9800GX2 is with using AA. This is more of a memory problem then anything else. Doing AA @ 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 with 512 MB of memory is not really feasible. ATI realized this as well and put in extra memory on the 4870x2. I think a 2GB 9800GX2 would really put nVidia back in competition with the 4870X2. At present the 1GB 9800GX2 retails as low as $265. Adding a extra GB of memory will push this upto not more then $350 and still keep it to within 5% of the $570 4870X2.