Nvidia yesterday said it is shipping its latest mid-range graphics chip, the GeForce 6800 GS, and the part is now available for consumers to buy.

The 130nm 6800 GS chip is said to be clocked at 425MHz with memory set to 500MHz (1GHz effective). The chip has five vertex engines and 12 pixel shader pipelines, setting it between the lesser 6800 and the higher-specced 6800 GT.

The chips supports both DDR and GDDR 3 SDRAM, connected across a 256-bit bus. Memory bandwidth is 32GBps. The GS supports SLi.

Like other GeForce 6800 family members, the GS supports DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0, along with Nvidia's Intellisample 3.0, PureVideo 3.0, CineFX 3.0 and UltraShadow II technologies, plus 64-bit texture filtering and blending.

GeForce 6800 GS-based cards will cost around $249 (£143/€211) and are shipping now from the likes of Albatron, Chaintech, Innovision, Leadtek, MSI, Palit, PNY, Sparkle and XFX. Expect the part to appear in a range of PCs from the world's system builders too, Nvidia said.

The launch comes a day after Taiwanese graphics card maker sources alleged ATI was experiencing product shortages. They claimed supplies of Radeon 9250, X300, X550, X1300, X1600 and X1800 parts are not as high as they could be. ®