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Graphics Technology

NVIDIA Ships Decent DX10 Graphics Card For Under $100 208

Posted by kdawson from the stay-out-of-the-uncanny-valley dept.
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."
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NVIDIA Ships Decent DX10 Graphics Card For Under $100 More

NVIDIA Ships Decent DX10 Graphics Card For Under $100

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  • nVidia 9400M (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @05:30PM (#30135268) Homepage Journal

    How does the GT240 compare to a 9400M?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by imbaczek ( 690596 )
      apples to oranges.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by hatemonger ( 1671340 )
      It's a little better: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gt-240,2475-8.html [tomshardware.com]

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by poetmatt ( 793785 )

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by hatemonger ( 1671340 )

          You can almost get a 4870 for less than that which would be DX11 compatible/significantly faster.

          Uh, no. That would be 10.1 on any ATI card that starts with 4. Nice try, though.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by poetmatt ( 793785 )

            try again. [tomshardware.com]

            DirectX 11 Support for hardware
            tessellation will be an explicit part of the DirectX standard for the first time. To date, ATI's HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series have all contained a hardware tessellation unit

            DX11 and DX10.1 will be sharing a lot of features. DX10.0 does not. All the people getting an 8800gt for example, got screwed by that. I'm glad NV has a DX10.1 solution, but when will anyone have a copy of the DX11 card to test?

            Sorry though, I meant to link the 5750, I was looking through stuf

            • Yes, earlier ATI units had a tesselator, but the tesselator isn't DX11 compliant at all. In addition, none of the other DX11 features-esp. notable here are Shader Model 5 and Compute Shaders-have hardware support in ATI units below the 5xxx series.

            • Actually, that doesn't mean that those cards support DX11. It's just that they support a feature of DX11, but not all features, which is what would be required to be a DX11 card. The Radeon HD 2000 series cards have the tesselation unit, sure, but they're DX10.0 cards, not even 10.1. I should know, I own one. Of course DX10.1 and DX11 share features, one is a subset of the other... usually, that's how APIs work.

            • Why are you people moderating him insightful? (Score:5, Interesting)

              by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Wednesday November 18, 2009 @12:12AM (#30139520)

              This guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

              First off, DX 10 and 10.1 have a lot more in common than DX 10.1 and 11, hence the version numbers. DX 10.1 was largely a more strict version of the DX 10 standard, for example requiring 4x FSAA filtering and 32-bit FP rendering. Well all DX 10 hardware supports that anyhow so no big deal. Still there were differences that required new hardware to fully support 10.1.

              Now DX 11 has some new stuff and DX 10.1 cards are NOT compatible. Tessellation is one of those and yes earlier ATi cards do have a tessellator, but it's not DX11 compatible. However that's now all that's new. Another big one would be Shader Model 5.0. This adds various features such as double precision support and a new compute shader "basically a way of addressing the shader hardware for GPGPU stuff).

              So older cards are NOT DX 11 capable. A notable absence in the ATi 4 series would be double precision support.

              I should note that this doesn't mean that they can't use the DX 11 library, it just means they don't support DX 11 features. The break between 9 and 10 (where old hardware couldn't support 10 at all) appears to be the last for awhile. DX 10 hardware can use DX 10.1 and DX 11 APIs, but it doesn't support the new features.

              However when someone calls something a "DX 11 card" what they mean is "A card that supports the full DX 11 feature set." Currently the only cards on the market meeting that designation are the ATi 5000 series. The ATi 4000 series are DX 10.1 cards.

              For more info on what's new in DX 11 see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee417843(VS.85).aspx#Full [microsoft.com] that's MS's page on it which will get as highly technical as you'd like.

        • Radeons don't have video acceleration (Score:2, Insightful)

          by 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 ans

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by arth1 ( 260657 )

          It depends on what you're going to use it for. The 8800s don't have full CUDA support, for example. And for some, the extra texture memory will make a difference.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by toddbanng ( 1498667 )
      Um. in the realm of great video cards, RADEON currently holds it with the 5870 series of HD cards, which are already DX11 ready and blow the socks off of anything Nvidia has, esp. in CrossFire configs. What I don't understand is why Nvidia drops this to market now, when it's still chewing on whether it'll do anything with DX 11? By that time, RADEON/ATI will be on it's 2nd Gen of their great HD cards, and Nvidia "might" be just rolling their out? Don't get me wrong, but onboard graphics are eons from the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by smash ( 1351 )
      It should destroy a 9400M

  • Tom's Hardware Link (Score:5, Informative)

    by CannonballHead ( 842625 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @05:31PM (#30135310)
    I prefer the performance graphs/comparisons at Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com].
  • Now can we have it in low profile please?
    • Probably sucks up too much power. I'd rather have a low profile Radeon HD 5650 or 5670 for my HTPC since it supports Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio bitstreaming.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sc0ob5 ( 836562 )
        Well it doesn't take an extra power adapter.. I really don't mind what it is but something that actually has a bit of power would be nice. Also I run my HTPC on Linux so I'm not sure those fancy audio features are working yet on the ATI drivers, and what about hardware decoding?? I currently have a 8400GS ticking away in my system quite nicely, not really much good for anything but decoding..

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 )

        This card is VDPAU Featur Set C. Which is the
        Currently, the portions capable of being offloaded by VDPAU onto the GPU are motion compensation (mo comp), inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT) and VLD (Variable-Length Decoding) for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264 / DivX 6), VC-1, WMV3/WMV9, Xvid / OpenDivX (DivX 4), and DivX 5 encoded videos.

        My CPU never broke 10% with anything from Xvid to 1080p x264.

        Now if we could only get the sound working [ubuntuforums.org]

        Last I checked AMD just finally re

  • Um, so? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hatemonger ( 1671340 ) on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @05:32PM (#30135322)
    While I understand that there is a psychological influence of the whole "under $100" mark, is it really that much different than the standard price reductions and increasing power of graphics cards over time?

    • Feature set.

      I'm out of the PC Gaming scene(in fact, my computer is Grape. [penny-arcade.com]).

      But I do understand the idea of building a sub 500 dollar PC that supports Windows 7 and nearly any game you awnt to throw at it though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeng ( 926980 )

      The performance is increasing per dollar, but the manufacturing of the video cards is an almost set price.

      Much like with hard drives, yes there are 2 terabyte hard drives for around $200, but that does not mean that you can find a (recently manufactured) 200 gig hard drive for $20. The cost of all the sub-systems sets the base price.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sznupi ( 719324 )

      With such cards you're buying also low power draw (now, if only that was actually seriously utilised with passive cooling as standard...)

  • how do ati cards at the same price do next to this?

  • Surprisingly, it almost can [tomshardware.com]

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Can you clarify your use of the word almost? I read that chart as 30-60fps depending on resolution.

      Are my standards too low?

      • Is it telling that they didn't bother to benchmark it with AA/AF turned on?

        The Crysis demo became near unplayable on my 8800GT at 1280x1024 High detail when I cranked up AA to 4x.

  • Dear NVidia, (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Nice chip. I'm waiting until you make a 40nm GPU that beats the 9800GT. 40mn is required because heat and noise are crucial to me. All of your fast 2xx series stuff is hot and power hungry, so I haven't moved.

    Listen carefully: My magic price point is $200 or less. TPD must be no more than approximately 100W, ah la the 9800GT. I want 1GB (but I'll settle for 768) because 512MB is too small now. I have never cared about SLI and I won't start anytime soon. I *DO* care about heat and noise, so make these

  • Anyone know how this compares to a GTS 250-based card [nvidia.com]? As those are also DX10-compliant and can be easily found for around $120 [newegg.com], I'm not sure what the value of this new model is... beyond the psychological impact of hitting the magic $99 price point, of course.

  • Can this card render HD 1080p@30FPS? What's the puniest Pentium that can deliver that HD data to it fast enough from a SATA drive?

    And is there a Linux driver?

  • Yay! Re-badged 9800GT FTW! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Freak ( 16973 ) <anonymousfreak@i ... inus threevowels> on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @06:42PM (#30136414) Journal

    Come on, nVidia... Stop with the re-branding already.

    This is just a die-shrunk 9800 GT, which was just a die-shrunk 8800 GT.

    Yes, it's a great card for $100. But stop misleading people into thinking it's the same tech as the GTX 260-285.

    (They did the same with the "GTS 250", which is just a re-badged 9800 GTX, which was just a re-badged 8800 GTS.)

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Carra ( 1220410 )
      The've been doing it for ages.

      A geforce 4 mx was based on the geforce 2 chip set. So it was not only weaker then the other geforce 4 cards, it was also weaker then the previous, third generation. The reason that they keep doing this is quite simple, they sold [wikipedia.org] even if every magazine listed is as a must avoid:

      "Despite harsh criticism by gaming enthusiasts, the GeForce4 MX was a market success. Priced about 30% above the GeForce 2 MX, it provided better performance, the ability to play a number of popul

    • Come on, nVidia... Stop with the re-branding already.

      This is just a die-shrunk 9800 GT

      and somehow its slower than my 8800GS 384MB

  • What's with that hedline (Score:3, Informative)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportlandNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @06:59PM (#30136662) Homepage Journal

    I paid 76 dollars for my 9600 GT, fanless, and it' is direct x 10 compatible.

  • Nvidia just released a slower card at the same price point than a card that ATI has had out for months. This is huge and amazing and stuff.

  • Sure got told... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Suiggy ( 1544213 ) on Wednesday November 18, 2009 @01:41AM (#30140160)

    1.7% yields of Fermi GPUs in first batch.
    Wooden screws used in the non-working Fermi prototype card which Nvidia claimed was working.
    Q2 2010 release date now for consumer Fermi GPUs instead of the promised Q4 2009 release.
    20% clock miss on Fermi architecture.

    And now they're releasing re-badged crap yet again.

    When will it end?

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