ATI Technologies has quietly unveiled its RADEON 9250 graphics processing unit aiming at the very low-end of the market. The novelty sports DirectX 8.1 capabilities and its main peculiarity is the lowest cost possible, but not exceptional performance.

The RADEON 9250 is based on the RADEON 9200 architecture with 4 rendering pipelines, 1 vertex shader engine along with built-in RAMDAC, TMDS and TV-Out controller. ATI’s original DirectX 8.1 micro-architecture was first unveiled in 2001 with the RADEON 8500 and then adopted for various needs, including low-cost products.

The difference between the RADEON 9200 and RADEON 9250 graphics chips seems to be slightly lower core-clock of the latter along with some more flexible PCB design guidelines allowing add-in-cards makers to act depending on their vision of the market and needs of their customers.

An ATI’s spokesperson did not immediately returned enquiry for comments.