NVIDIA cashes in on mid-market – GeForce 9800 GT, 9500 GT released

GeForce 9800 GT, 9500 GT released - Image 1A bit late in the news but still cinder-hot is the announcement from consumer graphics technology leaders NVIDIA which introduced two new players into the graphics solutions market. And as you can tell, they aren’t the biggest ever. In fact, one of them has been spun over the rumor mill a few times before. The second is a new entry with some promise to get the lower end machine hopping onto the mid-level powerhouse range. Details at the full story.

NVIDIA cashes in on mid-market - GeForce 9800 GT, 9500 GT released - Image 1 

Noise echoing from the hardware community is that NVIDIA has pushed forth the (mostly teased) GeForce 9800 GT, while introducing a new player to the market: the 9500 GT. And from what we hear, the graphics technology company hasn’t changed a thing about the GeForce 9800 GT.

So the specifications that nailed the 9800 GT as a remake of the 8800 GT continue to ring true today, and expect nothing more out of the SKU other than the customizable printed circuit board. Now there’s enough pimping to perform around the case, so we’re not sure how graphics card customization is going to be it’s primary selling factor.

Instead, all eyes are focused on the GeForce 9500 GT, the new low-powered and low-priced SKU from the company. Sporting a 65-nm core processor clocking in at 550 MHz, and a set of 32 shader stream processors pumping 1,400 MHz of computing frequency, the 9500 GT has a lot to make up for in image, since the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 managed to grab an ample portion of the lower markets due to its great performance on its price range.

To add a bit of gaming prowess to the card, its GDDR3 (GDDR2 SKUs were also mentioned) banks will not go lower than 256 MB, and it’s 256-bit interface will haul as much as 25.6 gigabits of information per second via the PCI-E 2.0 certified bus.

Sporting the high-end connectivity of double DVI ports plus a TV-out socket, the 9500 GT also supports 2-two SLI and would only sip as much as 50 watts of juice from your power supply. Good stuff so far, eh?

But how does the US$ 99.00 card fare in performance? Well, the little puppy gets close to 60% of the 9600 GT’s performance, and even tops over your neighbor’s ATI Radeon HD 3650. What it can’t do is play Crysis at standard 17-inch LCD resolution (high-quality, non-widescreen, non-anti-aliasing, mind you) and come close to 20 frames per second average.

Still, you’d expect that much with a 8800 GTX with AA enabled on 1050p, so no major hurt there. The 9500 GT’s heatsink is also good enough to keep the card cool, and it also comes with future support for PhysX and CUDA as soon as they’re mixed in to the unified driver architecture. And we’ll get right on that as the news comes.


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