In March this year S3 Graphics released its Chrome 430 GT graphics card and it was designed to take on the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and it managed to do rather well in most of the tests we performed, which you can read here.

 

S3 are back again now with the 65nm and PCI Express 2.0 based Chrome 440 GTX graphics card which has been released today. It will sell for $69 USD and should be available to buy soon through S3 Graphics' retail affiliate.

 

You can think of it as the bigger brother of the 430 GT and it now comes with HDMI output which was one of the biggest letdowns of the 430 GT that we mentioned in our review. These cards are cheap, offer DX10.1 support, provide HD playback at 1080p with the ChromotionHD 2.0 Video Engine. That enables hardware acceleration for H.264, MPEG-4, VC-1, WMV-HD and AVS and for dual-stream (PIP) Blu-ray playback.

 

It won't knock your socks off when it comes to gaming performance but if it can beat out an HD 4850 when we test it next month, it will begin to get into the territory where it could be used for playing even current games at lower settings.

 

You can find out more detailed information over at the S3 Graphics product website, which is right here.