GPUCafé

Fourteen months after the launch of the G200 series, Nvidia is finally going to introduce its G200 entry level GPU; the GT220. This marks the first 40nm product from Nvidia based on the GT216 ASIC. It is also the first G200 series entry-level SKU that is geared for the consumer retail space as until now the other 40nm ASICs were only limited to the OEM space. Nvidia is set to launch the GT220 tomorrow, its Thanksgiving present to gamers on a budget. Is it enough to whet their appetite?

Sadly no, going by the gaming performance. The Geforce GT220 falls short of the Radeon HD 4670 by 30-35% on average and only manages to come out on top in one title; GRAW2 by 10%. In majority of the games, the card seems like it is bottlenecked by the low memory bandwidth.

The big letdown is the pricing, the MSRP is set at $79USD. The Radeon 4670 can be found online for as low as $60USD or the Geforce 9600GT for $80USD offer much value for your money. Since there are no accurate numbers for the yields, we can only expect that Nvidia has a smaller die size advantage compared to RV730 (4670). The reference design PCB also requires fewer layers, so Nvidia should be able to drive down the price of this SKU pretty quickly.

The best aspect of the launch is that the Geforce GT220 is widely available from all the major retailers in decent quantities. Hopefully Nvidia is able to drive down the price of this product quickly to make it viable product against the competition, because the gaming performance is sub par and the feature set isnt great either, this product is not DirectX 11 compliant. The NDA for reviews expires tomorrow and as usual we’ll bring you the most comprehensive review round up, stay tuned.