S3 Chrome 500 Series Graphics Chips Announced

S3, the graphics label for VIA, announced their Chrome 500 series graphics chips yesterday, offering up a competitor to the Radeon HD 4350 line as well as other budget cards that provide features at a much lower price.

This new hardware sports a newer unified shader processor that provides support for DirectX 10.1+ as well as OpenGL 3. Other specs include a 500MHz memory processor, 620MHz core and a stock card decoding Blu-ray. The Chrome 500 is also rather quiet.

You can already get acquainted with the Chrome series by means of the Chrome 530 GT. It features 512MB of memory, an HDMI output, a dual-link DVI and up to a 2048 x 1536 resolution. It costs $45, acting as a mid range card among the current low-end competition from AMD.