It may have taken NVIDIA a long time to get it's DirectX 11 act in gear, but the company's doing everything it can to make up for that latency. The company has rolled out the third entry in the GeForce 400 family, introducing the GTX 465, which has the budget-minded gamer squarely in its sights.

The top of the line GTX 480 rolled onto store shelves in late March with limited availability, ecked out ATI for the "fastest single card" title, and is steaming along nicely -- along with its slightly scaled back brother, the GTX 470. Both of these cards are fast, but each will set you back more than $300 clams, which remains the enthusiast price point. NVIDIA needed a mass market DX 11 option, which the GTX 465 represents.

The GTX 465 has 11 streaming multiprocessors or 352 CUDA cores, compared to the GTX 480's 15 SMs and 480 CUDA cores and GTX 470's 14 SM's and 448 CUDA cores. What the GTX 465 sacrifices in performance is hopefully made up for by it's sub-$300 pricetag, lower thermal footprint, and reduced power consumption, which should make it a solid option for more casual gamers looking for an affordable step up to DirectX 11 performance. The GTX 465 shares the same dual-slot, 40nm form factor as its bigger brothers -- and the same core clock speed of the GTX 470 (607MHz).

We'll give our hands-on impressions shortly, so stay tuned.