NVIDIA Corp., a leading graphics and logic company, unveiled Wednesday its new low-end graphics cards that are projected to offer end-users relatively high performance in 3D applications at very low price-points. The new low-end breakthrough is a result of PCI Express interconnection, that allows graphics card makers to equip their products with less onboard memory than usual and use system memory as frame-buffer.

“The days of outdated graphics technology in value-priced systems has come to an end now that NVIDIA has shipped the first TurboCache-enabled GPUs to customers. GeForce 6200 with TurboCache redefines the price/performance equation in the value PC segment. For the first time, it is feasible for PC OEMs to offer the industry’s most advanced feature set, including support for Direct X 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 support, to their value segment customers,” said Jeff Fisher, executive vice president of worldwide sales at NVIDIA Corp.

The GeForce 6200 TurboCache graphics cards will be equipped with either 16MB, 32MB or 64MB local memory with 32-bit, 64-bit or 128-bit bus, but will be able to store textures and other data in the system memory, which will allow graphics cards makers to save on graphics memory, but will require some additional memory. Given that PCI Express bus has about 8GB/s transfer rate, while some modern entry-level graphics cards are equipped with memory providing only about 3GB/s of bandwidth, graphics cards with reduced amount of onboard memory may easily compensate the lack of high-speed onboard storage.

Recommended pricing for NVIDIA GeForce 6200 16MB, 32MB and 64MB graphics cards is $79, $99, $129 respectively. NVIDIA GeForce 6200 GPUs with TurboCache technology are shipping to customers now and graphics cards are anticipated to be available from numerous add-in card manufacturers and in systems from leading PC OEMs in January 2005.