The GeForce 200 Series is the 10th generation of Nvidia's GeForce graphics processing units, still based on the Tesla (microarchitecture) (GT-codenamed chips), named after the inventor and physicist Nikola Tesla.
The GeForce 200 Series introduces Nvidia's second generation of Tesla (microarchitecture), Nvidia's unified shader architecture; the first major update to it since introduced with the GeForce 8 Series.
The GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 are based on the same processor core. During the manufacturing process, GTX chips are binned and separated through defect testing of the core's logic functionality. Those that fail to meet the GTX 280 hardware specification are re-tested and binned as GTX 260 (which is specified with fewer stream processors, less ROPs and a narrower memory bus).
In late 2008, Nvidia re-released the GTX 260 with 216 stream processors, up from 192. Effectively, there were two GTX 260 cards in production with non-trivial performance differences.
The GeForce 700 Series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, used in desktop and laptop PCs. It is mainly based on a refresh of the Kepler microarchitecture (GK-codenamed chips) used in the previous GeForce 600 Series, but also includes cards based on the previous Fermi (GF) and later Maxwell (GM) architectures. A number of GeForce 700 series chips were released for mobile devices in April 2013. GeForce 700 series cards were first released in May 2013, starting with the release of the GeForce GTX Titan on February 19, 2013, and the GeForce GTX 780 on May 23, 2013.
GK110 has been designed and is being marketed with computational performance in mind. It contains 7.1 billion transistors. This model also attempts to maximise energy efficiency through the execution of as many tasks as possible in parallel according to the capabilities of its streaming processors.
With GK110, increases in memory space and bandwidth for both the register file and the L2 cache over previous models, are seen. At the SMX level, GK110's register file space has increased to 256KB composed of 65K 32bit registers, as compared to Fermi's 33K 32bit registers totaling 128 KB. As for the L2 cache, GK110 L2 cache space increased by up to 1.5MB, 2x as big as GF110. Both the L2 cache and register file bandwidth have also doubled. Performance in register-starved scenarios is also improved as there are more registers available to each thread. This goes in hand with an increase of total number of registers each thread can address, moving from 63 registers per thread to 255 registers per thread with GK110.
The GeForce 600 Series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, used in desktop and laptop PCs. It serves as the introduction for the Kepler architecture (GK-codenamed chips), named after the German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer Johannes Kepler. GeForce 600 series cards were first released in 2012.
Where the goal of the previous architecture, Fermi, was to increase raw performance (particularly for compute and tessellation), Nvidia's goal with the Kepler architecture was to increase performance per watt, while still striving for overall performance increases. The primary way Nvidia achieved this goal was through the use of a unified clock. By abandoning the shader clock found in their previous GPU designs, efficiency is increased, even though it requires more cores to achieve similar levels of performance. This is not only because the cores are more power efficient (two Kepler cores using about 90% of the power of one Fermi core, according to Nvidia's numbers), but also because the reduction in clock speed delivers a 50% reduction in power consumption in that area.
The GeForce 200 Series is the 10th generation of Nvidia's GeForce graphics processing units, still based on the Tesla (microarchitecture) (GT-codenamed chips), named after the inventor and physicist Nikola Tesla.
The GeForce 200 Series introduces Nvidia's second generation of Tesla (microarchitecture), Nvidia's unified shader architecture; the first major update to it since introduced with the GeForce 8 Series.
The GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 are based on the same processor core. During the manufacturing process, GTX chips are binned and separated through defect testing of the core's logic functionality. Those that fail to meet the GTX 280 hardware specification are re-tested and binned as GTX 260 (which is specified with fewer stream processors, less ROPs and a narrower memory bus).
In late 2008, Nvidia re-released the GTX 260 with 216 stream processors, up from 192. Effectively, there were two GTX 260 cards in production with non-trivial performance differences.