Nvidia Corp., the largest supplier of discrete graphics processing units (GPUs), on Thursday unveiled the first member of the GeForce 9 family: the GeForce 9600 GT. The new chip promises to deliver nice performance at its price-point, but some indirect signs point to the fact that massively produces GeForce 9600-series graphics cards are due at a considerably later date.

Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT chip features 64 stream processors at 1625MHz as well as 32 texturing units, 16 render back ends and 256-bit memory bus. The base clock for the chip is 650MHz and Nvidia recommends its partners to use 1800MHz GDDR3 memory for 512MB graphics cards. The new chip is a successor of Nvidia’s GeForce 8600 GTS and has the same micro-architecture, but different amount of execution units dramatically rises its performance, which can be discovered later in this news-story.

In addition to increased performance, the new performance-mainstream graphics card by Nvidia features PCI Express 2.0 bus support, DisplayPort interconnection in addition to dual-link DVI and D-Sub outputs. Broad compatibility is likely to allow Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT to exist on the market for a relatively long time. Microsoft DirectX 10.1 feature-set is not avalable on the GeForce 9600 GT.

Graphics cards based on Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT graphics processing unit (GPU) are expected to be available in retail for the price in the range between $169 and $189. Despite of the price, the new boards deliver respectable performance in numerous games, X-bit labs web-site has discovered.

“After going to all the GeForce LANs and seeing the rigs that gamers play on, we wanted to kick off the GeForce 9 with the perfect GPU for gamers. The first product to be introduced in the GeForce 9 family gives gamers the horsepower to play cutting-edge DirectX 10 games at a price they will love and can afford,” said Ujesh Desai, general manager of GeForce desktop GPUs at Nvidia.

Unfortunately, things may not be very positive for pricing and availability of the GeForce 9600 GT-based graphics cards. Graphics boards based on Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT sent to X-bit labs were all based on A1 revision of the code-named G94 chip. Typically Nvidia releases its chips commercially in A2 revision. Nvidia’s code-named G92 graphics processor, which powers the latest GeForce 8800-series products, was launched as A2 with certain capabilities disabled. Those features are expected to be re-enabled only in A3 version of G92 set to be out in February or March.

Performance results were obtained on typical X-bit Labs' testbeds under usual conditions in laboratories located in Tallinn, Estonia.

Yaroslav Lyssenko and Alexey Stepin contributed to the news-story.