Release of Nvidia 7300 and...

7900!!! Mid March!!

Source: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1912280,00.asp

Nvidia Corp. on Wednesday launched its latest graphics controller, a lower-performance counterpart to the GeForce 7800.

Although the cards will carry an affordable price tag of about $99 while supporting the features like Pixel Shader 3.0, the new GeForce 7300 GS also drops performance metrics like pixels per clock and vertex fill rate by an appreciable margin. GeForce 7300 GS cards will arrive in time for Chinese New Year (Jan. 26) in Asia, and in North America and Europe by early February.
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However, the GeForce 7300 GS rounds out Nvidia's low-end offerings, providing an affordable complement to the 7800, which can can retail for between $350 to $650, depending upon the retailer and whether the card is overclocked. The GeForce 7300 GS announcement follows two similar value-oriented nForce4 chipset announcements on Tuesday.

Feature-wise, the 7300 GS supports both Pixel Shader 3.0 as well as high-dynamic-range (HDR) lighting, both of which have been supported in a small number of recent game releases and updates.

Within the 7300 GS lies a mere 64-bit memory interface, however, small potatoes compared to the 256-bit memory interface used by the high-end 7800. The card does include the Nvidia TurboCache technology, which can use available system DRAM for graphics processing.

On paper, the vertex fill rate of the 7300 GS is just 413 million vertices, compared to 1.1 billion for the 7800; the 7300 GS's pixel fill rate is 2.2 billion pixels/s, versus 13.2 billion pixels/s for the 7800. Finally, the 7300 GS' memory bandwidth is 6.5 Gbytes per second, compared to 54.4 Gbytes/s for the 7800.

"The GeForce 7300 GS GPU is an ideal foundation for today's mainstream PCs because it offers high-definition video playback features that can not be matched by integrated graphics -- and it is designed to have consumers ready for the transition to Microsoft's next-generation operating system," said Ujesh Desai, general manager of desktop GPUs at Nvidia, in a statement. "For a home theater PC, GeForce 7300 GS delivers exceptional video acceleration and incredible image quality to take the viewing experience to the next-level. For an entry- level gaming PC, GeForce 7300 GS delivers Shader Model 3.0 support and support for high dynamic-ranging lighting (HDR), which we expect new games will require in the future."

The 7300 GS can output video at resolutions up to 1080i, according to Nvidia.

According to reports, leaked beta versions of Nvidia's ForceWare drivers also indicate that a GeForce 7300 LE is in the works. The next-generation GeForce 7900 is rumored to be released in mid-March at the CeBIT 2006 show in Hannover, Germany.