Nvidia Corp. this week quietly unveiled a new entry-level graphics card that it positions as an alternative to integrated graphics solutions. The GeForce GT 520 costs starting from $60 and is not exactly designed for traditional PC gaming, but rather for casual gaming as well as multimedia applications.

Powered by the GF119 graphics processor - which is based on the company's latest Fermi architecture - the novelty sports 48 stream processing units, 8 texture units, 4 raster operation units, 64-bit memory controller and so on. Nvidia's recommended clock-speeds for the GeForce GT 520 are 810MHz for the chip, 1620MHz for stream processors and 1800MHz for DDR3 memory. The board consumes up to 29W of power.

The GeForce GT 520 fully supports all the modern technologies, including DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, OpenCL 1.1 and can playback all modern high-definition video formats, including Blu-ray 3D, with hardware acceleration. The graphics card can be used for acceleration of PhysX effects or CUDA-exclusive programs.

Given its technical specifications, the GeForce GT 520 will hardly provide decent performance in DirectX 11 games with high-quality graphics settings and therefore those, who want to play new titles should pick up something more advanced. Nonetheless, the graphics board will offer better video quality than Intel Corp.'s integrated graphics engines, playback stereo-3D content, better compatibility with games as well as will be able to accelerate compute intensive OpenCL, DirectCompute or CUDA applications.

The novelty carries recommended price tags of $59.99.

Tags: Nvidia, Fermi, GF119