Enthusiasts are normally concerned with crazy framerates and
high resolutions. The hardware required though is hardly cheap,
and the fact of the matter is, high-end video cards are not the
cash cows you might expect. The real money for most companies
come from the mid-ranged to mainstream parts found in your under-$200
aisles and eMachine-ish PCs.
Today NVIDIA will be announcing their GeForce 7300 GS product.
Aimed strictly at the mainstream, their latest will compete directly
against ATI's X1300 product line. The GeForce 7300 GS will feature
4 pixel pipes and 3 vertex shaders. The core will be clocked at
550MHz, but the memory clock will vary depending on what the add-in
card partner decides on. NVIDIA expects you will see a number
of GeForce 7300 GS based graphics cards with a memory clock at
400MHz (DDR2) on a 64-bit memory interface. TurboCache is supported
with this product which can bump up the total addressable memory
via the PCI Express bus.
As with all of the GeForce 7 Series GPUs, the GeForce
7300 GS features PureVideo which will provide very good image
quality at the targeted price-point. Therefore, builders of HTPCs
can look into this product since it will accelerate MPEG-2 in
hardware, as well as Windows Media HD Video (WMV HD). The GPU
offloads video decoding from the CPU and should provide smoother
video playback and lower CPU usage. PureVideo offers advanced
de-interlacing and enhanced 3:2 and 2:2 pulldown to cut down on
the blur and ghosting which they say is present with ATI products
(this is something many editors have noted, including us in independent
reviews).
There will be more on the way, but the 7300 GS is
the first NVIDIA part built on a 90nm fab process. While the reference
cards will be actively cooled, we can expect to see a few 7300
GS based cards with passive cooling from their add-in card partners.
At this moment, SLI will not be supported with the
GeForce 7300 GS. Pricing will also vary depending on the layout
by the add-in card partners, but the MSRP is currently set at
$99. We do not have any benchmarks yet, other than what NVIDIA
has shown us, but according to their tests, the 7300 GS is expected
to be between 20% to 90% faster than the X1300 across several
benchmarks. We'll be better able to confirm these numbers as soon
as we receive our review samples.
HOME
