Nvidia Corp. has introduced two new chips that will serve mainstream and entry-level market segments and will increase the pressure on offerings from ATI Technologies, whose recent lineup needed tangible price decreases to make them more valuable for customers. The release of the GeForce 7600 GS and GeForce 7300 LE may cause more price slashes.

“Our sales data indicates that the GeForce 7 Series graphics architecture is preferred by our customers, and GeForce 7600 GS fills in the only remaining hole in the incredibly-strong GeForce 7 product line-up from Nvidia. The price band of $129 to $149 is immensely popular among our customers, so a product based on the highly-regarded GeForce 7 Series architecture in this price range is sure to be in very high demand,” said Howard Tong, vice president at online store Newegg.com.

The GeForce 7600 GS is a down-clocked flavour of the GeForce 7600 GT, it sports twelve pixel shader units, five vertex shader units, is clocked at 450MHz and comes with 256MB of 128-bit 800MHz memory. The GeForce 7300 LE is a version of the GeForce 7300 GS that sports four pixel processors, three vertex processors and is clocked at 400MHz. Graphics cards makers may choose the speed of the 7300 LE depending on their requests, but Nvidia recommends 667MHz DDR memory.

Both GeForce 7600- and 7300-series GPUs support DirectX 9.0 shader model 3.0, PureVideo technology and other innovations.

Loads of graphics cards makers promised that they would release their products based on the new chips.