GeForce
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GeForce is a brand of PC graphics chipsets designed by NVIDIA. The first GeForce products were designed and marketed for the high-margin computer gamer community, but later product releases expanded the line to cover all tiers of the graphics market, from low-end to high-end. As of 2006, there have been eight iterations of the GeForce design.
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[edit] Name origin
The "GeForce" name originated from a contest held by NVIDIA in early 1999. Called "Name That Chip", the contest called out to the public to name the successor to the RIVA TNT2 line of graphics boards. There were over 12,000 entries received and 7 winners received a RIVA TNT2 Ultra graphics board as a reward. [1][2]
[edit] Generations
- GeForce 256
- Launched in August 1999, the GeForce 256 (NV10) was the first PC graphics chip with hardware transform, lighting, and shading although 3D games utilizing this feature did not appear until later. Initial GeForce256 boards shipped with SDRAM memory, and later boards shipped with faster DDR memory.
- GeForce2
- Launched in April 2000, the first GeForce2 (NV15) was another high-performance graphics chip. NVIDIA moved to a twin texture processor per pipeline (4x2) design, doubling texture fillrate per clock compared to GeForce 256. Later, NVIDIA released the cost-reduced GeForce2 MX which offered a compelling value in the low/mid-range market segments and was popular with OEM PC manufacturers and users alike.
- GeForce3
- Launched in February 2001, the GeForce3 (NV20) introduced DirectX 8.0 programmable pixel shaders to the GeForce family. It had good overall performance and shader support, making it popular with enthusiasts although it never hit the midrange price point. Technology developed for the GeForce3 later emerged in the Microsoft Xbox game console.
- GeForce4
- Launched in February 2002, the high-end GeForce4 Ti (NV25) was mostly a refinement to the GeForce3. The biggest advancements included enhancements to anti-aliasing capabilities, an improved memory controller, a second vertex shader, and a manufacturing process size reduction to increase clock speeds. A later "family member," the budget GeForce4 MX, was a GeForce2 MX with a few additions from the new GeForce4 Ti line. It targeted the value segment of the market.
- GeForce FX
- Officially launched in November 2002, the GeForce FX (NV30) was a huge change in architecture compared to its predecessors. The GPU was designed not only to support the new Shader Model 2 specification but also to perform well on older DirectX 7 and 8 titles. NVIDIA marketed the cards as "the dawn of cinematic rendering". Products in this series carry the 5000 model number, therefore this is also known as the GeForce 5 Series.
- GeForce 6
- Launched in April 2004, the GeForce 6 (NV40) added Shader Model 3.0 support to the GeForce family, while correcting the weak floating point shader performance of its predecessor. It also implemented high dynamic range imaging and introduced SLI (Scalable Link Interface) and PureVideo capability.
- GeForce 7
- The 7th generation GeForce (G70/NV47) was launched in June 2005. The design was a refined version of GeForce 6, with the major improvements being a widened pipeline and an increase in clock speed. The GeForce 7 also offers new transparency supersampling and transparency multisampling anti-aliasing modes (TSAA and TMAA). These new anti-aliasing modes were later enabled for the GeForce 6 series as well.
- A modified version of GeForce 7800GTX called the RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' is used as the main GPU in the PlayStation 3 from Sony.
- GeForce 8
- Released on November 8, 2006, the 8th generation GeForce (G80) is the first NVIDIA GPU to fully support DirectX 10. Built on a brand new architecture, benchmark testing has produced strong results against top-of-line GPUs from competitor ATI.
[edit] Mobile chipsets
Since the GeForce 2, NVIDIA has produced a number of counterpart designs for notebook computers, such as the GeForce Go, a notebook graphics processing unit (GPU).
In most cases, the GeForce Go products are very similar in feature set and performance to their desktop counterparts. Currently, models range from the lower end GeForce 7300 to the high-end performance GeForce 7900 GS and 7950 GTX (However, these cards are only available from certain manufacturers on select models).
[edit] Product naming scheme
The company has followed a naming scheme that relates each product to a market segment.
| Card Name (* denotes wildcard) | Usual Suffix | Example Product | Product Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| *9**
*8** |
GTX, GTS, Ultra, GX2 | 8800GTX,7900GTX,6800Ultra | High End |
| *7**
*6** |
Ultra, XT, GT | 5700 Ultra, 6600, 7600GT | Mid Range |
| *5**
*4** |
MX, Ti, GS, Le | 5200, 6500Le, 7100GS | Entry Level |
Suffix indicate different layers of performance. As cards age, what was top-end performance for that time, becomes mainsteam for the current time, e.g: 6800 was top-end and is now mainsteam since release of 7800, 7900 and 8800. It is also important to note that the amount of graphics memory (GDDR) on a card does not provide an accurate measurement of performance in the mid-range and low-end sectors. Manufacturers will sell budget cards with 512 MiB of memory because it makes the card sound more powerful than it is and so more people will buy it. Some analysts claim that low-end cards cannot even use all the memory available.
[edit] References
- ^ NVIDIA "Name That Chip" contest results
- ^ Taken, Femme. nVidia "Name that chip" contest, tweakers.net, April 17, 1999.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
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