S3 Graphics Releases The Chrome 440 GTX

VIA has been on a rampage this week with new release announcements from the OpenBook reference design to the Nano processor. Their latest announcement is coming out of S3 Graphics, which is a VIA Technologies company. S3 Graphics has announced the release of the Chrome 440 GTX, which is a PCI Express 2.0 graphics card.

The S3 Chrome 440 GTX is "ideally suited for PC users who wish to enhance their PCs to provide dual-stream Picture-in-Picture (PiP) 1080p Blu-ray Disc playback with the latest DirectX 10.1 / OpenGL 2.1 unified shader architecture. The Chrome 440 GTX uses the latest GDDR3 memory for optimized memory bandwidth and native HDMI connectivity for the latest digital displays." This graphics card also features ChromotionHD 2.0+ Video Technology and S3 Graphics PowerWise Technology.

Their asking price for this low-profile PCI-E 2.0 solution is just $70 USD. Unfortunately, S3 Graphics doesn't offer Linux drivers for the Chrome 400 series at present and it's unknown whether VIA's open-source strategy will impact this joint-venture company with GPU documentation, or Linux/OSS drivers. More information on this graphics card can be found on the Chrome 440 product page.