In this paper, we obtain a more precise estimate of upper bound of the Hausdorff dimension of the global attractor for damped nonlinear wave equations with the Dirichlet boundary condition. The obtained Hausdorff dimension decreases as the damping grows and is uniformly bounded for large damping, which conforms to physical intuition. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0022-2488(99)04502-8].