NVIDIA‘s GeForce 8800 series took the market by storm when it was launched at the end of last year and the G80 architecture has proven to carry a lot of nice technology which isn’t just useful for the really high-end cards. We’re all waiting for the cheaper cards of the GeForce 8800 series and now it seems we will get some satisfaction at the middle of February. According to VR-Zone NVIDIA is namely planning to launch a cheaper version of its GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card. In other words, not a real budget card but a cheaper entry model for the G80 architecture. The new card will use the 8800 GTS circuit with 96 unified shaders and 24 texture processors. The thing separating the new from the old is the amount of graphics memory as it is has been cut in half.
From 640MB GDDR3 memory down to 320MB which is a significant change, but at the same time it sticks to the same setup for the memory circuits and thus keep the bus at 320-bit. Both GPU and memory will work at the same frequencies as today’s GTS cards so the only performance difference should be with games requiring a large memory buffer. To compensate NVIDIA has set a recommended price at 299 USD, which is 100 USD less than the regular GTS model. We’re looking forward to seeing the first reviews of NVIDIA’s new cards which could become a really hot competitor to Radeon X1950 XT 256MB.
