Graphics developer Nvidia has quietly rolled out its GeForce 9600 GSO video card, offering strong performance at a price that should appeal to both mid-range consumers and system manufacturers looking to put a little extra bump in their graphics offerings without significantly raising their products price tags.
The 9600 GSO is designed to compete with AMD’s still unreleased Radeon HD 3830 graphics controller. The 9600 GSO shares the same architecture as Nvidia’s current GeForce 9600 GT graphics card.
The Nvidia GeForce 9600 GSO features 96 processor cores and a base clock speed of 550 MHz; the card sports 384 MB of discrete video memory and can push 38.4 GB/s across its memory bus. The card supports DirectX 10 and display resolutions up to 2,560 by 1,600 pixels; the system also supports HD video entertainment with Nvidia’s PureVideo HD technology and CPU-offloading capabilities. The GeForce 9600 GSO can also be used in an SLI array with another 9600 GSO card for twice the performance, and the card is PCIe 2.0-compatible so users can move it forward to future systems.
Third party manufacturers will be integrating the 9600 GSO into their offerings, and consumer version should be available at prices below that of the 9600 GT, although Nvidia hasn’t released suggested retail pricing. The jury is out on how this card will perform relative to the 9600 GT or Nvidia’s earlier 8800 GTs: on a spec-by-spec basis, they may compare favorably, but real-world performance will depend on the game/application and screen resolution: at higher screen resolutions, bandwidth limitations in the 9600 GSO may impede its performance relatively to other Nvidia offerings.
