Several add-in card partners of Nvidia Corp. on Monday announced new graphics adapters that Nvidia used to sell only to its OEM partners. The new products are aimed at the low-end and mainstream markets and support DirectX 10.1 application programming interface. Given that the novelties are not performance champs in their respective categories, the impact of their release is unlikely to be significant. Still, they will bring some money to Nvidia and its allies.

The GeForce 210 (GT218 chip) graphics solution has only 16 stream processing units, which means that its performance should be comparable to Nvidia GeForce 9400M core-logic with built-in graphics core. The GeForce GT220 (GT215 chip) graphics processor sports 48 stream processors, therefore, its performance will be higher compared to GeForce 9500-series discrete graphics chips. Previously, models 210 and GT220 were only available for OEMs. Retail graphics cards will feature slightly different clock-speeds.

Both new chips support DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.0 application programming interfaces, hardware decoding and post-processing of high-definition videos as well as other functionality of contemporary graphics processing units, including compatibility with numerous applications that use GPUs for general purpose processing. The GT218 and GT215 chips are made using 40nm process technology at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s production facilities.

Even though Nvidia’s new chips allow the company to address low-end and mainstream markets with low-power offerings that have certain functionality benefits compared to predecessors, their performance will be hardly sufficient compared to ATI Radeon HD 4700-series. Moreover, since there are still graphics cards like GeForce 9800 GT at low price points on the market, the novelties will have hard time competing against them as well.

Nvidia GeForce 210 and GeForce GT 220 will be available from various partners of Nvidia Corp., including Gigabyte Technology, Gainward, Galaxy, Sparkle, XFX, Zotac and others.

Tags: Nvidia, Geforce, 40nm, GT218, gt215