GeForce GT 240

The GeForce GT 240 is equipped with four TPC texture processing clusters, each of which contains 24 stream processors, giving 96 processing cores. Like the GeForce GTX 280, each TPC cluster contains eight TMUs, resulting in 32 texture units. Two 64-bit ROPs are capable of processing four pixels per clock each, while they are connected to a 128-bit memory bus and can perform eight raster operations per clock. Thus, you can expect the GT 240 to provide less than half the processing power of the GeForce GTX 285.

The new GeForce GT 240 is also manufactured using TSMC's 40nm process, which has allowed Nvidia to make more profit on its sub-$100 GPUs compared to 55nm and 65nm versions. Of course, the new processor has common features compared to the G 210 and GT 220 models, namely support for DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1, eight channels of LPCM audio output and improved support for playback of DivX, VC-1 and MPEG-2 video codecs. The GeForce GT 240 is not only certified for CUDA and PhysX support, but also supports GeForce 3D Vision glasses.

But the biggest differences with the Nvidia GeForce GT 240 lie in memory support. If the GeForce GT 220 is limited to supporting DDR2 and GDDR3, then the new GeForce GT 240 can work with both DDR3 and GDDR5. This is important because GDDR5 memory provides twice the theoretical bandwidth per clock compared to DDR2 and GDDR3. The beauty of this solution is that it allows the GeForce GT 240 to provide similar bandwidth compared to graphics cards equipped with GDDR3 memory with a 256-bit memory interface (like the 9600 GT), but the cost remains quite low. GDDR5 memory was one of AMD's trump cards when the company introduced the Radeon HD 4800 line, now it's Nvidia's turn to use this technology. In addition, this is the first time we've seen GDDR5 memory on a video card for the sub-$100 market. Installing GDDR5 memory will allow Nvidia to close the performance gap between 128-bit graphics cards like the Radeon HD 4670 and 256-bit graphics cards like the GeForce 9600 GT.

Characteristics of NVIDIA GeForce GT 240

The GeForce GT 240 also stands out because it was the only reference video card in this performance segment without a separate additional power connector. As a result, it competes directly with the Radeon HD 4670, the previous performance king among reference graphics cards without an additional PCIe power connector.