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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 gamer community of computer users, 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 seven iterations of the GeForce design. NVIDIA regularly releases technology demos, which are often used for promotional purposes at computing events to demonstrate features present in the GeForce line of products.
GeForce card generations
- GeForce 256 : Launched in August 1999, the high-end GeForce 256 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.
- GeForce 2 : Launched in April 2000, the first GeForce 2 (GTS) was another high-performance graphics chip (codenamed the NV15). Doubling its predecessor's texture-rendering throughput, the GTS once again established NVIDIA's performance leadership over its competitors - the ATI Radeon and 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. Later, NVIDIA released the cost-reduced GeForce 2 MX. The MX retained the 3D-rendering feature set (such as hardware transformation and shading) of the flagship GTS. Faster versions of the GeForce 2 GTS were also released in the guise of Pro, Ultra, and Ti versions.
- GeForce 3 : Launched in February 2001, the GeForce 3 (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. The GPU was sometimes outperformed by GeForce 2 Ultra since the Ultra had a faster core clock; however, the GeForce 3 was able to outperform the Ultra at higher resolutions and when anti-aliasing was applied due to an improved and more efficient memory controller. Technology developed for the GeForce 3 later emerged in the Microsoft Xbox game console. The initial 'vanilla' GeForce 3 was later joined by a slightly cut-down version, the Ti 200, and a slightly faster version, the Ti 500 (which was claimed to be around 10% faster).
- GeForce 4 : Launched in February 2002, the high-end GeForce 4 Ti (NV25) was an incremental upgrade to the GeForce 3. A later "family member," the budget GeForce 4 MX, stirred controversy due to the MX's vastly inferior feature set. Commentators criticized the product's name, as the GeForce 4 MX was much closer functionally to an upgraded GeForce 2 (with improvements in the memory controller and video processing engine). The GeForce 4 MX sold in huge volumes, in some cases because of customers being misled by the "GeForce 4" label, but the card was respected as a capable and relatively fast budget gaming card, despite the lack of shader technology.
- GeForce FX : Officially launched in November 2002, the GeForce FX (NV30) initially suffered from production problems and did not become widely available until the following year. With a marketing tagline of "the dawn of cinematic rendering," NVIDIA marketed the FX series as a revolutionary part with new cinematic effects. Compared to ATI's Radeon 9700, the FX series performed poorly on DirectX 9 shader operations — the crucial element of "cinematic rendering." In many (shader 2.0) synthetic benchmarks, the fastest FX version trailed far behind (as much as 60-70% slower) the equivalent competition from the ATI R300 series. Even after a refresh (product redesign) cycle, later FX products (such as the 5700 and 5900) still trailed far behind their R300-based counterparts. The FX series also suffered from a high level of incompatibility because of issues with the shader, although this was largely due to buggy drivers which were later fixed. The GeForce FX series became a subject of controversy when it was discovered that NVIDIA had "optimized" specific drivers to work with 3D Mark 2003, a popular benchmarking program used by media reviewers to compare graphic cards. The company had often applied pressure on the media to use these "official" drivers, which lended credence to claims that that NVIDIA "tweaked" its drivers to produce better 3D Mark results in order to show the chipset as superior to ATI's Radeon 9x00 series. As a result, many websites pulled their 3D Mark 2003 results for GeForce FX cards, citing reason to believe that the results were not representative.
- GeForce 6 : Launched in April 2004, the GeForce 6 (NV40) adds Pixel Shader 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0 support to the Geforce family, while correcting the weak shader performance of its predecessor (GeForce FX). It also implements OpenEXR High Dynamic Range and introduces SLI (Scalable Link Interface) and PureVideo capability. The lineup consists of three high-end models: the 6800GT and the 6800 Ultra, then later the 6800 GS; mid-end performance models (6800 GTO, 6800) mainstream models (6800 XT, 6800 LE, 6600 GT, 6600 DDR2, 6600) and low-end models (6600 LE, 6500, 6200, 6200 TC) and integrated models (6150, 6100).
- GeForce 7 : Launched in June 2005, the GeForce 7 (G70) is an evolutionary improvement on the GeForce 6 architecture. The GeForce 7 offers new transparency supersampling and transparency multisampling anti-aliasing modes (TSAA and TMAA), as well as improved rendering speed and reduced power consumption. Breaking with past traditions of the GPU market, NVIDIA timed the announcement of the GeForce 7 with immediate retail availability. All models of the GeForce 7 series are exclusively PCI-express models, except for the 7800GS, which is exclusively AGP. The GeForce 7 consists of high-end models (7900GTX, 7800 GTX 512, 7800 GTX), mid-end performance models (7900GT, 7800 GT), mainstream models (7800 GS AGP, 7600GT, 7600 GS) and low-end models (7300 GS, 7300 LE).
- GeForce 8 : Details about the GeForce 8 (based on the internally named G80 chipset) have been made public. It is known that the new series will be the first NVIDIA cards with native DirectX 10 capability. While there is widespread speculation by PC gaming enthusiasts, no other confirmed facts were available as of mid-2006.
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.
See also
External links
GeForce | GeForce | GeForce | GeForce | GeForce | GeForce | Geforce | GeForce
"GeForce"