Nvidia has announced the GeForce 7200 GS, a card that delivers Vista Premium Ready graphics performance for a mere $50. NVIDIA touts full support for DirectX 9.0, shader model 3.0 and high dynamic-range with the entry-level card. The G72 graphics core, clocked at 450 MHz, is essentially a crippled GeForce 7300-series core: half the pipelines. This brings the total pixel pipelines to two, each with one texture unit. PureVideo video processing is also supported; however, NVIDIA is unclear if the GeForce 7200 GS supports PureVideo HD for high-definition video decoding acceleration.
Add-in board manufacturers are free to equip GeForce 7200 GS graphics cards with 128MB or 256MB of DDR2 memory attached to the GPU via a 64-bit memory interface. NVIDIA recommends 800 MHz for GeForce 7200 GS graphics cards. GeForce 7200 GS based graphics cards will be available to OEMs, system builders and retail. NVIDIA add-in board partners with GeForce 7200 GS products include Albatron, ASUS, Biostar, ECS, EVGA, Foxconn, Galazy, Gigabyte, Innovision, Leadtek, MSI, Palit, Point of View, PNY Technology, SPARKLE, XFX, Zogis and Zotac.