NVIDIA IS LAUNCHING a new low end card today, the GeForce 7300GS. It is a 4 pixel pipe, 3 vertex unit not-monster of a card, but it has a respectable 550MHz core clock and 400MHz memory, give or take a little depending on OEM. The card is based on the 7-series GPUs, so all features from the family, barring SLI, should be present.
This is a low end GPU, but it still steps away from the mold in a few ways. It has turbo-cache, not hot air but the ability to use system memory for GPU purposes. While this usually means 32 or 64MB of memory, these cards are expected to come with 128 or 256, again it depends on OEM and price targets. This will be a big step up from the old low end cards, and give the X1300 set a lot to sweat over. Memory size aside, it still only comes with a 64-bit memory interface.
With the launch of the 7300 series chips, there is now a top to bottom solution from NVidia for PS3.0 cards, no holes or renaming an old card. The only remaining gap now is the mid-range, something that is sure to be filled in soon, the 6600 is good, but getting old.
)