Moving forward with the transition to 40nm, Nvidia has officially taken its GT200 architecture to the mainstream today with the retail launch of the GeForce G210 and GeForce GT220 graphics cards. Both products carry prices well below the $100 mark, and are the company's first desktop solutions to offer support for DirectX 10.1 as well as Shader Model 4.1.

If this sounds anything at all familiar, you may remember Nvidia first unveiled the GeForce G210 and GT220 back in July as "OEM products," meaning they were already available with new PC purchases only.


As far as technical specifications go, the GeForce GT220 comes with a reference clock speed of 625MHz, 48 processor cores running at 1,335MHz and a gigabyte of DDR3 memory operating at 790MHz via a 128-bit interface. The lower-end G210 features a GPU clocked at 589MHz, just 16 processor cores clocked at 1,402MHz and 512MB of DDR2 memory clocked at 500MHz connected via a 64-bit interface.

Inno3D and Gigabyte are among the first to announce graphics cards based on Nvidia's 40nm GPUs. Compared to their OEM counterparts, Gigabyte has bumped up core clocks and dropped memory speeds on both cards, while including a significantly larger heatsink and 80-mm fan with the GeForce GT 220.