"After going to all the GeForce Lans and seeing the rigs that gamers play on, we wanted to kick off the GeForce 9 with the perfect GPU for gamers," said Ujesh Desai, general manager of GeForce desktop GPUs at Nvidia.
"The first product to be introduced in the GeForce 9 family gives gamers the horsepower to play cutting-edge DirectX 10 games at a price they can afford."
Nvidia said that PC gaming had reached the point where the graphics requirements to play games such as Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3 at resolutions such as 1,900 x 1,200 and above may have outpaced a lot of installed hardware.
Until now, graphics processors capable of delivering playable frame rates at such settings have cost in excess of US$400, Nvidia said.
The GeForce 9600 GT GPU is designed to offer immersive gaming with " incredible" graphics to budget PC gamers for less than US$199.
The company said that its 9600 GT GPU shows an improved performance-per-watt ratio compared to its predecessor as well as improved compression efficiency.
In addition to 64 stream processors each clocked at 1625MHz, and a 256-bit memory interface running at 900MHz, the GeForce 9600 GT GPU is designed for the new PCIe 2.0 bus standard and features backwards compatibility with the PCIe standard.
