GeForce 700 series

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.

Overview

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.

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V is an open world, action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It was released on 17 September 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, on 18 November 2014 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and on 14 April 2015 for Microsoft Windows. The game is the first main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series since 2008's Grand Theft Auto IV. Set within the fictional state of San Andreas, based on Southern California, the single-player story follows three criminals and their efforts to commit heists while under pressure from a government agency. The open world design lets players freely roam San Andreas's open countryside and fictional city of Los Santos, based on Los Angeles.

The game is played from either a first-person or third-person view and its world is navigated on foot or by vehicle. Players control the three lead protagonists throughout single-player and switch between them both during and outside of missions. The story is centred on the heist sequences, and many missions involve shooting and driving gameplay. A "wanted" system governs the aggression of law enforcement response to players who commit crimes. Grand Theft Auto Online, the online multiplayer mode, lets up to 30 players explore the open world and engage in cooperative or competitive game matches.

GDDR5 SDRAM

GDDR5, an abbreviation for double data rate type five synchronous graphics random access memory, is a modern type of synchronous graphics random access memory (SGRAM) with a high bandwidth ("double data rate") interface designed for use in graphics cards, game consoles, and high-performance computation.

Overview

Like its predecessor, GDDR4, GDDR5 is based on DDR3 SDRAM memory, which has double the data lines compared to DDR2 SDRAM. GDDR5 also uses 8-bit wide prefetch buffers similar to GDDR4 and DDR3 SDRAM.

GDDR5 SGRAM conforms to the standards which were set out in the GDDR5 specification by the JEDEC. SGRAM is single-ported. However, it can open two memory pages at once, which simulates the dual-port nature of other VRAM technologies. It uses an 8N-prefetch architecture and DDR interface to achieve high performance operation and can be configured to operate in ×32 mode or ×16 (clamshell) mode which is detected during device initialization. The GDDR5 interface transfers two 32-bit wide data words per write clock (WCK) cycle to/from the I/O pins. Corresponding to the 8N-prefetch, a single write or read access consists of a 256-bit wide two CK clock cycle data transfer at the internal memory core and eight corresponding 32-bit wide one-half WCK clock cycle data transfers at the I/O pins.

GeForce 200 series

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.

Architecture

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.