October 11th 2010 is the launch date of Nvidia's latest Fermi based GeForce, the GT 430. This card is aimed at the largest market for discrete GPUs, the casual gamer and media consumption use market. This market is looking for a simple and easy upgrade to improve their occasional gaming experience and play their videos and movies smoothly and with high quality, plus basic photo and movie editing. Previously Nvidia addressed this market with the GeForce 210 and GeForce GT 220, although prebuilt desktops could feature variants such as the GeForce 205, 310 and 315. Below you can see the complete NVIDIA 'Fermi' GeForce 400 series line up:

Target Market

Fermi Geforce

Current Offerings

NVIDIA is strongly supporting 3D media, and as such uses the GeForce and GeForce GT branding to differentiate features. Cards with the GT designator can support 3D Vision for 'Theater quality' immersive 3D movies, but the GeForce without modifier is designed for desktop application and casual gaming, and movie playback without 3D or HD enhancing features. Below is a comparison of the desktop and prebuilt GeForce cards competing with the GT 430:

NVIDIA Geforce GT 430

NVIDIA Competition

If some of those specifications look familiar, it is because the GT216 and GT218 GPUs were based on the 55nm G94 and G96 designs, moved to TSMC's 40nm process to give better performance/watt. The GT215 core was previously known as G92b, but reduced in SP count from 128 to 96 for GT 240, and further dropped to 72 for the GT 320. All designs were also updated to support DirectX 10.1.

GF108 Features

The Fermi architecture inside the 585 million transistor GF108 core is one full Graphics Processing Cluster (GPC), consisting of two Steaming Multiprocessors (SMs) each containing 48 CUDA cores and a total of 16 texture units. Attached to this are two 64-bit memory controllers and frame buffer partitions, with a half ROP partition giving four ROPs. The core clock is 700MHz and, like other Fermi architecture designs, the shader clock is fixed at double this rate, at 1400MHz. This looks a lot like 50% of a GF106 in some respects; half the SMs but a much larger reduction in ROPs, and a drop from three memory controllers to two, and 128KB L2 cache.

GF108 Core

The GeForce GT 430 offers native dual-link DVI and HDMI outputs, supporting HDMI 1.4a, as well as VGA that can be removed for low-profile use. No external power connector is needed, and the sub 50W power envelope means just about any computer with a PCI-Express graphics slot and a 300W power supply should be able to use it.