While ATI delays the release of the R600 chip, NVIDIA is playing it smart: the products keep rolling out. As we have reported, NVIDIA has chips for the casual gamer on the way as well.
NVIDIA seems to already have a replacement for the ever-popular 7600GT and, yes, it is a DirectX 10 variant. The 8600GT will be first out of the gates and will sport cores running 540/1400MHz up to 580/1550MHz with a 256-bit memory interface. They are expected to have 256MB of GDDR3 memory, depending on which NVIDIA partner you purchase from. The 8600GT is expected to hit the market in the $149-189 range and will come in the standard PCI-E SLI-supported layout.
The 8300GT and GS will sport half of the shader processors that the 8600GT will come equipped with, and will have cores running at 500/1200MHz (GT) and 480/1000MHz (GS). NVIDIA will be dropping the memory interface to 128-bit on these cards and will have a range of 256MB of memory down to 128MB. We are expecting NVIDIA to price these cards from $79-119.
Overall, the mid-range cards seem to be pretty promising in price and offer a valuable upgrade into the DirectX 10 market. Keep in mind, though, that DirectX 10 games are few and far between. Presently, it’s primarily a card to prepare you for it.
We’ve also heard rumors on an 8800 Go-series chip which will run a bit slower than its desktop brother, but were not able to squeeze any solid numbers from our sources.
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