As you undoubtedly may have noticed, NVIDIA launched their anticipated G84 and G86 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) today, bringing DirectX 10 graphics to a wider audience and into the mainstream.

The new GPUs launched, completing NVIDIA's top-to-bottom DirectX 10 family, also notably the world's first top-to-bottom DirectX 10 family, are the GeForce 8600GTS series, the GeForce 8600GS series and the GeForce 8500GT series.

Featuring support for Microsoft's Windows Vista Operating System, the new GPUs follow the trend of NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series, by featuring full support for the DirectX 10 unified shader architecture, Shader Model 4 functionality and the NVIDIA PureVideo HD video processor, together with NVIDIA's Lumenex™ engine and Quantum Effects™, focussing on delivering superior image quality as well as the simulation and rendering of visual effects, in a gaming environment.

The G84 GPU, powering NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 series, is fabricated on an 80nm process and in the GeForce 8600GTS iteration, has a stock speed of 675MHz in the core speed department, together with 2000MHz in the memory speed department. Several launches by NVIDIA partners today of their respective implementations of the new GPUs, have shown that factory overclocked versions of these cards are increasing in variety and selection, with names such as Foxconn throwing their hat into the ring.

The GeForce 8600GT iteration features a stock speed of 540MHz and 1400MHz for the core and memory respectively.

Read more in the press release here.