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Nvidia ships 90nm, entry-level GeForce 7 GPU

No SLI support for 7300 GS

Nvidia last night extended its GeForce 7 GPU family down into the mainstream market, pitching the 7300 GS at entry-level systems. The 7300 GS is also Nvidia's first 90nm GeForce 7 chip.

The new graphics chip has a fill rate of 2.2bn pixels per second and can process 413m vertices each second. It supports a single-channel DDR 2 or GDDR 3 memory bus with a bandwidth of 6.5GBps, Nvidia said, suggesting the memory is clocked to 416MHz.

The part doesn't support SLi, Nvidia' multi-GPU technology, but it does support TurboCache, the company's technique for augmenting the chip's dedicated graphics memory with a bank of system RAM.

The 7300 GS supports DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0, and is ready for Windows Vista, Nvidia said. Like other GeForce 7 chips, it's based on version 4.0 of Nvidia's CineFX graphics engine, and incorporates Intellisample 4.0 and PureVideo for HD video support at up to 1080i resolution.

Nvidia said the 7300 GS was shipping immediately, and will appear in graphics cards priced around $100 for the US and European markets early next month. Expect to see the part in complete PCs from system builders in the same timeframe, the company forecast. ®

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