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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."

29 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. nVidia 9400M by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How does the GT240 compare to a 9400M?

    1. Re:nVidia 9400M by hatemonger · · Score: 2, Informative
    2. Re:nVidia 9400M by Nikker · · Score: 3, Funny

      I like turtles.

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    3. Re:nVidia 9400M by poetmatt · · Score: 2, Insightful

      barely at best, it's still slower than an 8800GT. You can almost get a 4870 for less than that. 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.

    4. Re:nVidia 9400M by hatemonger · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:nVidia 9400M by toddbanng · · Score: 2, Informative

      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 capacity of these cards, esp. in dual or triple SLI configs -and when you see the difference (which few do) I would guess that most folks would not be buying Dell, HP, EMachines crap online and building their own or looking at Cyberpower, Poly, MicroExpress, Falcon and others more regularly. Decent card only for what it does - do not expect to play ANY DX10 or DX 11 game in a decent FPS - it just can't do it!

    6. Re:nVidia 9400M by poetmatt · · Score: 2, Informative

      try again.

      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 stuff. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102859

    7. Re:nVidia 9400M by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      High-end PC game performance is already available to casual gamers.

      I put a Radeon 4650 in my new machine and it runs Crysis on high and handles very new games like Borderlands and COD Modern Warfare 2 without trouble. The machine is nothing special really. An i5 that cost me about $750 to build.

      Just for laughs, I put the 4650 in my i7 Win7 system (1366 socket) that I normally use for music production, and it drove my two big monitors beautifully.

      I've just ordered another 4650 (about $60) for the i7. It uses very little power.

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    8. Re:nVidia 9400M by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2, Informative

      d3ac0n, if you take your time shopping, and use sites like NewEgg, you can do a really solid system for even less.

      You probably know this already, but if you go to the Tom's Hardware Forum, and look at the section on home builds, people come up with builds and then other users pick them apart and make recommendations for better parts/lower prices. You can get a lot of ideas there.

      People are building solid i5 systems for $700 and less (w/ 4gig DDR3). Socket 1366 i7 systems for less than $1k. If you want to stay with the AMD, you can get a great system together for less than $500 w/ the Phenom II, etc.

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    9. Re:nVidia 9400M by i.of.the.storm · · Score: 2, Informative

      Err, the 4870 is about 1.5-2x as powerful as a 3870, which I believe was available maybe a few months after Crysis came out, and is about as fast as the 2900XT which preceded it and the 8800GT/GTS which also came out around the same time frame. One of those cards would easily run Crysis at medium paired with an average CPU of the time. I have a 2900 Pro and an AMD 5000+ x2 which are a bit slower than what a "hardcore gamer" would buy, and I played the Crysis demo on medium without much difficulty. High/Very high ran but were kind of pushing it. A "gamer's" system would probably have had a Core 2 Duo and an 8800GTS or two at the time, which would definitely be able to run Crysis on high, especially with two cards. To be honest, Crysis was never much ahead of the hardware that came out around the same time the game came out, but most people don't upgrade their computers frequently enough and more and more don't have a reason to besides new games, so it seemed like Crysis was some insane game, when in reality a system built for $800-900 could play it without difficulty or slowdowns. It's just that no one's going to build a new system for one game that ended up being not that mind-blowing besides the graphics.

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  2. Tom's Hardware Link by CannonballHead · · Score: 4, Informative

    I prefer the performance graphs/comparisons at Tom's Hardware.

    1. Re:Tom's Hardware Link by CannonballHead · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I looked into this a little bit. It looks like it's more or less the same performance as my 512mb 8800 GT. Anyone else confirm that? So this is mainly just a power and price thing...

    2. Re:Tom's Hardware Link by MartinSchou · · Score: 4, Funny

      Are you asking if your top range, two generation old graphics card is now having its performance matched by a low end, current generation graphics card?

  3. Um, so? by hatemonger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  4. Re:Sweet. by Jeng · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
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  5. Re:So, I have a question... by amicusNYCL · · Score: 3, Informative

    If a device can display video at 1080p 24+ frames per second, what's the point of more?

    Displaying a video and rendering a 3d scene are two entirely different things. With a video you don't need textures, bump mapping, or dynamic lighting, you just play the frames.

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  6. Re:how do ati cards at the same price do next to t by jandrese · · Score: 4, Informative

    ATI really doesn't have a card at this price point, which is probably why nVidia came up with this guy, to try to snap up the marketshare on people who have $100 to spend on a video card. Their old product at this price point was discontinued, but the replacement should be out in a couple of months or so.

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    I read the internet for the articles.
  7. Re:Great.. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

    Last I checked AMD just finally released XvBA with features that VDPAU had last year.

  8. Re:But will it run Crysis? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

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

    Are my standards too low?

  9. Dear NVidia, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 damn card builders use good cooling, which I define as "can tolerate less than perfect airflow (because fan filled holes = noise) using 1 large, quiet fan, at FULL load."

    Do that and I'll upgrade. Don't and I'll look very hard at Larrabee...

      - Loyal NVidia buyer

  10. Radeons don't have video acceleration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Radeons don't have video acceleration by modemboy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Wrong! But I'll cut ya some slack cause it was only released a few weeks ago:
      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_xvba_vaapi&num=1

      ATI cards do support video acceleration under linux, although not as nice of an implementation as Nvidia's yet...

  11. Yay! Re-badged 9800GT FTW! by Anonymous+Freak · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

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  12. What's with that hedline by geekoid · · Score: 2, Informative

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

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  13. Re:Yay! Re-badged 9800GT FTW! by Carra · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 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 popular games that the GeForce 2 could not run well—above all else—to the average non-specialist it sounded as if it were a "real" GeForce4—i.e., a GeForce4 Ti. Although it was frequently out-performed by the older and more expensive GeForce 3, many buyers were unaware, particularly as Nvidia was quick not to let the GeForce 3 remain on the market. GeForce 4 MX was particularly successful in the PC OEM market, and rapidly replaced the GeForce 2 MX as the best-selling GPU.".

  14. They don't? by Mal-2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is one generation old (not two) and more than adequate for the casual gamer. It's also under $100. It's also available in AGP, which is why I own one.

    Mal-2

    --
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  15. Re:Only if standard with passive cooling... by afidel · · Score: 2, Informative

    There's a silent 5750 coming out next week. Low power, silent, but able to play anything out there.

    --
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  16. Why are you people moderating him insightful? by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 that's MS's page on it which will get as highly technical as you'd like.

  17. Sure got told... by Suiggy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?