Nvidia officially introduced today the GeForce 9400 and 9300 motherboard GPUs for desktop PCs on the Intel platform.

According to the company, the new desktop GPUs integrate full system I/O and discrete-level performance in one-half the size of previous integrated graphics solutions. The Nvidia 9400/9300 desktop GPUs feature a 16-core CUDA-capable graphics architecture and will enable mainstream PC users to play the latest PC games and high-definition Blu-ray video playback without breaking the bank, Nvidia claims.

"By doing so much parallel processing on a single chip, they can accelerate the new visual computing applications people are getting, and at a reasonable price. The GeForce 9400 and 9300 mGPUs set a new standard for what users should expect from today?s more mainstream desktop systems," said Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.

"We?ve combined the power of three different chips into one highly compact and efficient GPU," said Drew Henry, general manager of MCP business unit at NVIDIA. "In doing so, we?ve redefined the level of performance people can expect from a motherboard solution to enrich visual computing experiences for mainstream systems. You can now have the performance of a discrete GPU in a small form factor PC."GPUs have long been essential platforms for rendering real-time images to computer screens, but software developers and system manufacturers have only recently begun using their parallel processing power to deliver a new level of performance for a variety of visual computing applications, including Adobe Creative Suite 4 and BadaBoom. Badaboom is a video transcoding application to speed up application performance and free up the PC for doing other tasks in parallel.

The new NVIDIA GeForce 9-Series motherboard GPUs feature:

- 16-cores for processing DirectX 10 games and CUDA-accelerated applications
- Video playback with NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology, which offloads 100% of all video processing from the CPU to the GPU
- Support for advanced audio and video connectivity, including uncompressed LPCM 7.1 audio, dual-link DVI, and HDMI
- Support for NVIDIA Hybrid SLI Technology
- Single-chip design with much smaller footprint

Motherboards featuring GeForce 9-Series motherboard GPUs are shipping this month from ASUS, ECS, EVGA, Foxconn, Galaxy, Gigabyte, J&W, MSI, Onda, Zotac, and XFX.