NVIDIA Ships Decent DX10 Graphics Card For Under $100

MojoKid writes "NVIDIA is launching a new mainstream graphics card today, aimed at consumers in the market for a relatively low-cost upgrade from an integrated graphics solution or older entry-level GPU. The new GeForce GT 240 features a GPU with 96 processor cores, 8 ROP units, and 32 texture filtering units. The GPU is manufactured using a 40nm process, features a GDDR5 memory controller (that's also compatible with GDDR3), and unlike NVIDIA's current high-end GPUs, the GT 240 is DirectX 10.1 compatible. For $100 or less, what's perhaps most interesting is that this graphics card actually puts up respectable frame rates with AA turned on and no external power needed beyond what a standard PCIe slot provides."

Re:Sweet.

[Jeng]

Integrated graphics aren't bad by design, just implementation.

This or better could be integrated, but instead what ends up as integrated graphics is the most bottom barrel POS that is barely capable of displaying a desktop wallpaper.

If they can stick it in a laptop, they can put it on a motherboard.

Re:nVidia 9400M

[poetmatt]

barely at best, it's still slower than an 8800GT. You can almost get a 4870 for less than that. [newegg.com] which would be DX11 compatible/significantly faster. Or get a 4850 which is still significantly faster and DX10.1.

basically, this was a bad move by nvidia, but it's all they have at the moment.

Radeons don't have video acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

Some day, ATI will have better drivers than Nvidia, and they'll even be open source. But today, Radeons don't have video acceleration at all, and certainly nothing nearly in the same league as VDPAU.

And video acceleration is the main reason someone would have a 9400M.

You're telling people to upgrade from something that works, to something that doesn't work. The original poster was probably asking if 9400M to GT240 would be an upgrade from something that works, to something that works better.

Anyway, to answer the question: with the GT240, you get MPEG4 acceleration. My dual-core Atom can already play MPEG4 with CPU, but it does sometimes tear, unlike MPEG2, h.264, etc. Doing that with dedicated hardware (which a top-of-the-line most-expensive Radeon that money can buy, is unable to do) would be pretty sweet.

DirectX 10.whatever? Who cares?

[Ed Avis]

Does it come with a free software driver, or at least include specs so you can write your own? If not, why does it deserve a Slashdot front page headline? There are plenty of Windows gaming sites for those who want that kind of thing.