Imagine if getting the support for current generation graphics technology didn't require spending more than $79.
Sure, performance wouldn't be good at all, and resolution would be limited to the lower end. But the latest games would all run with the latest features. All the excellent water effects in Half-life 2 would be there. Far Cry would run in all its SM 3.0 glory. Any game coming out until a good year into the DirectX 10 timeframe would run (albeit slowly) feature-complete on your impressively cheap card.
A solution like this isn't targeted at the hardcore gamer, but at the general purpose user. This is the solution that keeps people from buying hardware that's obsolete before they get it home. The idea is that being cheap doesn't need to translate to being "behind the times" in technology. This gives casual consumers the ability to see what having a "real" graphics card is like. Games will look much better running on a full DX9 SM 3.0 part that "supports" 128MB of RAM (we'll talk about that later) than on an Intel integrated solution. Shipping higher volume with cheaper cards and getting more people into gaming translates to raising the bar on the minimum requirements for game developers. The sooner NVIDIA and ATI can get current generation parts into the game-buying world's hands, the sooner all game developers can write games for DX9 hardware at a base level rather than as an extra.
In the past, we've seen parts like the GeForce 4 MX, which was just a repackaged GeForce 2. Even today, we have the X300 and X600, which are based on the R3xx architecture, but share the naming convention of the R4xx. It really is refreshing to see NVIDIA take a stand and create a product lineup that can run games the same way from the top of the line to the cheapest card out there (the only difference being speed and the performance hit of applying filtering). We hope (if this part ends up doing well and finding a good price point for its level of performance) that NVIDIA will continue to maintain this level of continuity through future chip generations. We hope that ATI will follow suit with their lineup next time around. Relying on previous generation higher end parts to fulfill current lower end needs is not something that we want to see as long term.
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