GeForce

GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia. As of 2013, there have been twelve iterations of the design. The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for add-on graphics boards, intended for the high-margin PC gaming market, and later diversification of the product line covered all tiers of the PC graphics market, ranging from cost-sensitive GPUs integrated on motherboards, to mainstream add-in retail boards. Most recently, GeForce technology has been introduced into Nvidia's line of embedded application processors, designed for electronic handhelds and mobile handsets.

With respect to discrete GPUs, found in add-in graphics-boards, Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon GPUs are the only remaining competitors in the high-end market. Along with its nearest competitor, the AMD Radeon, the GeForce architecture is moving toward GPGPU (General Purpose-Graphics Processor Unit). GPGPU is expected to expand GPU functionality beyond the traditional rasterization of 3D graphics, to turn it into a high-performance computing device able to execute arbitrary programming code in the same way a CPU does, but with different strengths (highly parallel execution of straightforward calculations) and weaknesses (worse performance for complex decision-making code).

GeForce 300 series

The GeForce 300 Series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia based on their Tesla (microarchitecture). The first card of this series was launched in November 2009. Similar to the GeForce 100 series, the GeForce 300 series consists of re-branded video cards from the previous generation available only for OEMs. All GPUs of the series support Direct3D 10.1, except the GT 330 (Direct3D 10.0).

History

On 27 November 2009, Nvidia released its first GeForce 300 series video card, the GeForce 310. However, this card is a re-brand of one of Nvidia's older models (the GeForce 210) and not based on the newer Fermi architecture.

On 2 February 2010, Nvidia announced the official titles of the new generation GF100 (Fermi) cards, the GeForce GTX 470 and the GeForce GTX 480.

Later that month the company announced the release of the GeForce GT 320, GT 330 and GT 340, available to OEMs only. The Geforce GT 340 is simply a rebadged GT 240, sharing exactly the same specifications, while the GT 320 and 330 are new cards (albeit still based on the previous generation GT200b and G92b architecture).

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.