It looks like graphic card manufacturers may have to consider another twist when developing video cards these days. Not only for gaming, home theater requirements have grown through the months and it looks like S3 has developed the right formula in bringing together price and quality in one setting.

The latest addition to S3’s power-efficient Chrome 500 Series graphics processor family, the 850MHz DDR3-based Chrome 540 GTX GPU. The new GPU is capable of handling dual-stream Blu-ray and HD videos. It features a DisplayPort digital interface and HDMI and dual-link DVI and therefore supports connectivity to the latest digital monitors and HDTVs.

The new 540GTX GPU supports DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.0 for both Windows and Linux platforms. However, the card only can handle non-gaming rendering graphic applications well.

The card will ship bundled with WinDVD 8 for Blu-ray playback at no extra cost. Video cards based on the new GPU are now available with prices that vary depending on configuration. Nevertheless, they will cost much less than the higher priced cards from vendors such as Nvidia or ATI.

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