Nvidia officially announced today its new mid-range graphics card in the D9x graphics family, the Geforce 9600GT, which is manufactured in 65nm technology.

SLI-Ready,the GeForce 9600 GT chipset offers 64 stream processors, a 256-bit frame buffer, standard-setting GeForce 9 Series features and support for DirectX 10 games.

Nvidia claims that the new 9600GT offers up to a 90% performance increase over the comparable 8 Series GPU ? GeForce 8600 GTS.

Featuring the PureVideo HD technology engine, the GeForce9600 GT GPU delivers smooth Blu-ray movie picture quality with reduced CPU utilization and power consumption.

The 9600 GT's configuration includes a core clocked at 650MHz with a shader clock speed of 1625 MHz and 512MB of 1800 MHz memory.

The card also require a 6-pin power connector and will consume around 95W of power in a single-card setup. The board also features two dual-link DVI outputs and a single multi-out video connector for output to a high-definition TV.

Starting from today, the 9600GT is available by Nvidia's partners for $169~ 189. Nvidia's rival AMD today announced price cuts on its high-end Radeon HD 3870. The card was priced at $249, and now it has dropped to $189 while the HD 3850 dropped $30 from its original $199 price point to better compete with the GeForce 9600 GT.