Going along with its plans to transition to 40nm, Nvidia has another desktop graphics card for us today dubbed the GT 220. Our readers are well aware of the name GT 200 for some time now, and while Nvidia launched the GT 220 OEM version back in July, it was time for the retail version as well. The aforementioned OEM card had a quiet introduction, and since you couldn't purchase it without buying an entire rig, we guess some of you didn't even know it existed.

Geforce GT 220 is a 40nm card with 48 shaders at 1335MHz, 615MHz core and 790MHz memory. It comes with 1GB of GDDR3 memory on a 128-bit interface, which is less than ideal when considering the ever growing requirements for pleasant or even decent gaming. While we'd rather see more bandwidth on the GT 220, meaning pairing up GDDR3 with 256-bit memory interface, such a move would certainly negatively reflect on this card's pretty appealing price tag.

Judging by the number of stream processors, currently called CUDA cores by Nvidia(ns), we can't expect wonders from GT 220's performance, so more memory would've been an overkill. Other specs list 8 ROPs and 16 texture filter units. Price and performance-wise, GT 220 can be considered a low-end card, and it currently goes for about 60 euro.

An interesting feature is the DX10.1 support on the GT 220, as AMD has had it for a while now and Nvidia argued that such a feature is somewhat pointless. So, the AMD-promoted DX10.1 games can be played with Nvidia's hardware as well. Other features worth noting include PhysX and CUDA app support, but we can't forget the fact that the GT 200 brings 1.3a HDMI support, including the uncompressed 7.1 channel audio.

The next DX10.1 card Nvidia plans to launch is the Geforce GT 210, and its story is identical to the GT 220's - OEM version introduced in July 2009 and the clocks and configuration haven't changed. The GT 210's core still runs at 589MHz GPU, shaders at 1402MHz while the DDR2 memory with a 64-bit interface runs at 500MHz.

It seems Nvidia allowed its partners to clock ther cards as they see fit, so it's safe to assume that we'll soon see GT 220 cards clocked over 700MHz.