Nvidia launches entry-level GeForce 9 GPU

Nvidia has tacitly confirmed speculation about the specifications of its upcoming GeForce 9600 GSO graphics card by launching the thing.

As expected, the GSO connects to 384MB of graphics memory over a 192-bit bus. The Ram runs at 800MHz, the GPU itself at 550MHz, though the chip's 96 unified shaders are clocked at 1375MHz.

That, said, Nvidia yields a texture fill rate of 26.4bn polygons per second. The memory bandwidth is 38.4GB/s.

Those numbers put the GSO at the bottom of the GeForce 9 list, though it offers all the key features of its stablemates: support for SLI, HD disc decoding, PCI Express 2.0 and DirectX 10.

The GSO comes in ahead of the ATI Radeon HD 3830, AMD's bid to undercut the GeForce 9600 GT.