The Competition: Radeon HDs And GeForces

Remember what we said on page one: "The sub-$80 market represents a very diverse model selection with the least price differential, along with the tightest margins." Well, we meant it.

This means that the GeForce GT 220 and 210 are entering a crowded melee of graphics cards, not only from the competition, but from existing offerings in Nvidia's portfolio.

The GeForce 210 is priced similarly to the Radeon HD 4350 and Radeon HD 4550, in addition to the GeForce 9400 GT and 9500 GT DDR2:

Based on this, we can see that the GeForce 210 is looking very close to the GeForce 9400 GT. Both sport 16 processor cores. But looking closer, we notice that the 9400 GT can handle twice the raster operations per clock, and has a memory interface twice as wide. As far as competition goes, the Radeon HD 4350 and Radeon HD 4550 look quite daunting with their 80 shader cores. But keep in mind that the Nvidia and ATI architectures are so different that the number of cores are not comparable. Really, the biggest threat comes from the DDR2 version of the GeForce 9500 GT, which outclasses the competition for the price.

Now let's look at the GeForce GT 220, which has some stiffer competition, including the Radeon HD 4650 and Radeon HD 4670, and GeForce 9500 GT DDR3 and 9600 GSO (while even touching the bottom end of GeForce 9600 GT price territory).

Notice how both the GeForce GT 220 and GeForce 9600 GSO are vying for the same territory between the GeForce 9500 GT and GeForce 9600 GT. This is a very crowded segment right now. What's interesting is that Nvidia has been battling ATI's very compelling Radeon HD 4670 with the GeForce 9600 GSO up until now.

Now, the 9600 GSO is a great card, but it's often based on the larger 65nm G92 GPU or 55 nm G94 GPU. These higher-end pieces are not really able to make much margin in the low-end market segment. The GeForce 9600 GSO is consequently the only card in this neighborhood that requires a discrete PCI Express (PCIe) power cable to supplement its slot, and the card isn't nearly as efficient as competing products in this price segment. On the bright side, it's the only competing card with a 192 or 256-bit memory interface, so it can handle memory-intensive tasks like anti-aliasing a little better.

With this in mind, our feeling is that Nvidia is hoping the new GeForce GT 220 (specifically, the GDDR3 flavor) will be able to replace the more expensive to manufacture GeForce 9600 GSO as its Radeon HD 4670-fighter. This is something to keep in mind when we're looking at the benchmarks. In addition, the DDR2 version of the GeForce GT 220 will probably butt heads with the Radeon HD 4650, in addition to its GeForce 9500 GT GDDR3 predecessor.