GeForce 500 Series - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The GeForce 500 Series is a family of graphics processing unit

Graphics processing unit

A graphics processing unit or GPU is a specialized circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display...

s developed by Nvidia

NVIDIA

Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...

, based on the refreshed Fermi architecture. Nvidia officially announced the GeForce 500 series on 9 November 2010 with the launch of the GeForce GTX 580.

Overview

The Nvidia Geforce 500 Series graphics cards

Video card

A video card, Graphics Card, or Graphics adapter is an expansion card which generates output images to a display. Most video cards offer various functions such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors...

are significantly modified versions of the Nvidia

NVIDIA

GeForce 400 Series

The GeForce 400 Series is the 11th generation of Nvidia's GeForce graphics processing units. The series was originally slated for production in November 2009, but, after a number of delays, launched on March 26, 2010 with availability following in April 2010....

graphics cards, in terms of performance and power management. Like the Nvidia GeForce 400 Series graphics cards, the Nvidia Geforce 500 Series graphics cards support DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, and OpenCL 1.0. They were designed to compete with the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series

Northern Islands (GPU family)

The Northern Islands series is a family of GPUs developed by Advanced Micro Devices for its Radeon line, based on the 40 nm process.Starting with this family, the former ATI brand was officially discontinued in favor of making a correlation between the graphics products and the AMD branding for...

of graphics cards designed by AMD (ATI) in mid-2010 and released in October 2010.

The refreshed Fermi chip is large: it includes 512 stream processors, grouped in 16 stream multiprocessors clusters (each with 32 CUDA

CUDA

CUDA or Compute Unified Device Architecture is a parallel computing architecture developed by Nvidia. CUDA is the computing engine in Nvidia graphics processing units that is accessible to software developers through variants of industry standard programming languages...

cores), and is manufactured by TSMC

TSMC

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Limited or TSMC is the world's largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry, with its headquarters and main operations located in the Hsinchu Science Park in Hsinchu, Taiwan.-Overview:...

in a 40 nm

Nanometre

A nanometre is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one billionth of a metre. The name combines the SI prefix nano- with the parent unit name metre .The nanometre is often used to express dimensions on the atomic scale: the diameter...

process.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics card is the first in the Nvidia GeForce 500 Series to use a fully enabled chip based on the refreshed Fermi architecture, with all 16 stream multiprocessors clusters and all six 64-bit memory controllers active. The new GF110 GPU has been enhanced with full speed FP16 filtering (the previous generation GF100 GPU can only do half-speed FP16 filtering) and improved z-culling units.

On 25 January 2011, Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, which targets the "sweet spot" segment where price/performance ratio is considered important. With its more than 30% improvement over the GTX 460, and performance in between the Radeon HD 6870 and 6950 1GB, the GTX 560 Ti directly replaces the GeForce GTX 470.

On 17 February 2011, it was reported that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti would be launching on 15 March 2011. Although the GTX 550 Ti is a GF116 mainstream chip, Nvidia has chosen to name its new card the GTX 550 Ti, and not the GTS 550. Performance has been shown to be at least comparable and up to 12% faster than the current Radeon HD 5770. Price-wise, the new card treads into the range occupied by the GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB) and the Radeon HD 6790.

On 24 March 2011, the GTX 590 was launched as the flagship graphics card for Nvidia. The GTX 590 is a dual-GPU card, similar to past releases such as the GTX 295, and boasts the potential to handle Nvidia's 3D Vision technology by itself.

On 13 April 2011, the GT 520 was launched as the bottom-end card in the range, with lower performance than the equivalent number cards in the two previous generations, the GT 220 and the GT 420. However, it supports DirectX 11 and remains stronger than the GeForce G210, the GeForce G310, and the integrated graphics options on Intel CPUs.

On 17 May 2011, Nvidia launched a less expensive (non-Ti) version of the GeForce GTX 560 to strengthen Nvidia's price-performance in the $200 range. Like the faster GTX 560 Ti that came before it, this video card is also faster than the GeForce 460. Standard versions of this video card retail for around $200, perform comparably to the AMD Radeon HD 6870, and will eventually replace the Geforce 460. Premium versions of this card retail for approximately $225, operate at higher speed (factory overclocked), and are slightly faster than the Radeon 6870, approaching the performance of basic versions of the Radeon HD 6950 and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti.

Products

¹ SPs - Shader Processors - Unified Shaders
Unified shader model
Unified Shader Model term is used to describe two similar but separate concepts: Unified Shading Architecture and Unified Shader Model.- Unified Shader Model :...

(Vertex shader / Geometry shader / Pixel shader) : TMUs - Texture mapping units
Texture mapping unit
A texture mapping unit is a component in modern graphics processing units , historically it is a separate physical processor. A TMU is able to rotate and resize a bitmap to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D object as a texture...

: Render Output unit
Render Output unit
The Render Output Unit, often abbreviated as "ROP", and sometimes called Raster Operations Pipeline, is one of the final steps in the rendering process of modern 3D accelerator boards. The pixel pipelines take pixel and texel information and process it, via specific matrix and vector operations,...
² Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) in the GPU of GF110 architecture contains 32 SPs and 4 SFUs. Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) in the GPU of GF114/116/118 architecture contains 48 SPs and 8 SFUs. Each SP can fulfil up to two single precision operations FMA per clock. Each SFU can fulfil up to four operations SF per clock. The approximate ratio of operations FMA to operations SF is equal 4:1. The theoretical shader performance in single-precision floating point operations (FMA)[FLOPS_sp, GFLOPS
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...

] of the graphics card with shader count [n] and shader frequency [f, GHz], is estimated by the following: FLOPS_sp ≈ f × n × 2. Alternative formula: FLOPS _sp ≈ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA)). [m] - SM count. Total Processing Power: FLOPS_sp ≈ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA) + 4 × 4 SFUs) or FLOPS_sp ≈ f × n × 2.5.
³ Each SM in the GF110 contains 4 texture filtering units for every texture address unit. The complete GF110 die contains 64 texture address units and 256 texture filtering units. Each SM in the GF114/116/118 architecture contains 8 texture filtering units for every texture address unit but has doubled both addressing and filtering units.

Model	Year	Code name Code name A code name or cryptonym is a word or name used clandestinely to refer to another name or word. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage...	Fab (nm)	Transistors (Million)	Die Size (mm²)	Die Count	Bus Computer bus In computer architecture, a bus is a subsystem that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers.Early computer buses were literally parallel electrical wires with multiple connections, but the term is now used for any physical arrangement that provides the same... interface	Memory (MiB Mebibyte The mebibyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The binary prefix mebi means 220, therefore 1 mebibyte is . The unit symbol for the mebibyte is MiB. The unit was established by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 2000 and has been accepted for use by all major... )	SM count	Config core ^1,3	Clock rate			Fillrate Fillrate The term fillrate usually refers to the number of pixels a video card can render and write to video memory in a second. In this case, fillrates are given in megapixels per second or in gigapixels per second , and they are obtained by multiplying the number of raster operations by the clock...		Memory Configuration			API Application programming interface An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other... support (version)			Compute capability	GFLOPs FLOPS In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second... (FMA)²	TDP Thermal Design Power The thermal design power , sometimes called thermal design point, refers to the maximum amount of power the cooling system in a computer is required to dissipate. For example, a laptop's CPU cooling system may be designed for a 20 watt TDP, which means that it can dissipate up to 20 watts of heat... (watts)	Release Price
Model	Year		Fab (nm)	Transistors (Million)	Die Size (mm²)	Die Count			SM count	Config core ^1,3	Core (MHz Hertz The hertz is the SI unit of frequency defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications.... )	Shader (MHz Hertz The hertz is the SI unit of frequency defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications.... )	Memory (MHz Hertz The hertz is the SI unit of frequency defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications.... )	Pixel (GP Pixel In digital imaging, a pixel, or pel, is a single point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable screen element in a display device; it is the smallest unit of picture that can be represented or controlled.... /s)	Texture (GT Texel (graphics) A texel, or texture element is the fundamental unit of texture space, used in computer graphics. Textures are represented by arrays of texels, just as pictures are represented by arrays of pixels.... /s)	Bandwidth (GB Gigabyte The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is... /s)	DRAM type	Bus width (bit Bit A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states... )	DirectX DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...	OpenGL OpenGL OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...	OpenCL OpenCL OpenCL is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors. OpenCL includes a language for writing kernels , plus APIs that are used to define and then control the platforms...	Compute capability			USD	GBP
GeForce GT 520	April 13, 2011	GF119	40	?	79	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1024 2048	1	48:8:4	810	1620	1800	3.24	6.5	14.4	GDDR3 GDDR3 Graphics Double Data Rate 3 is a graphics card-specific memory technology, designed by ATI Technologies with the collaboration of JEDEC.It has much the same technological base as DDR2, but the power and heat dispersal requirements have been reduced somewhat, allowing for higher performance memory...	64	11	4.2	1.1	2.1	155.5	29	$59	£45
GeForce GT 530	May 14, 2011	GF118	40	585	116	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1024 2048	2	96:8:8	700	1400	1800	2.8	11.2	28.8	GDDR3 GDDR3 Graphics Double Data Rate 3 is a graphics card-specific memory technology, designed by ATI Technologies with the collaboration of JEDEC.It has much the same technological base as DDR2, but the power and heat dispersal requirements have been reduced somewhat, allowing for higher performance memory...	128	11	4.2	1.1	2.1	268.8	50	OEM	OEM
GeForce GT 545 DDR3	May 14, 2011	GF116	40	1170	238	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1536 3072	2	144:24:24	720	1440	1800	14.26	14.26	43	GDDR3 GDDR3 Graphics Double Data Rate 3 is a graphics card-specific memory technology, designed by ATI Technologies with the collaboration of JEDEC.It has much the same technological base as DDR2, but the power and heat dispersal requirements have been reduced somewhat, allowing for higher performance memory...	192	11	4.2	1.1	2.1	342.43	70	OEM	OEM
GeForce GT 545 GDDR5	May 14, 2011	GF116	40	1170	238	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1024	2	144:24:16	870	1740	1998	13.92	20.88	64	GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5 SDRAM is a type of high performance DRAM graphics card memory designed for computer applications requiring high bandwidth...	192	11	4.2	1.1	2.1	501.12	105	OEM	OEM
GeForce GTX 550 Ti	15 March 2011	GF116	40	1170	238	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1024	4	192:32:24	900	1800	4104	21.6	28.8	98.5	GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5 SDRAM is a type of high performance DRAM graphics card memory designed for computer applications requiring high bandwidth...	192	11	4.2	1.1	2.1	691.2	116	$149	?
GeForce GTX 560	17 May 2011	GF114	40	1950	360	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1024 2048	7	336:56:32	810	1620	4004	25.9	45.4	128	GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5 SDRAM is a type of high performance DRAM graphics card memory designed for computer applications requiring high bandwidth...	256	11	4.2	1.1	2.1	1075	150	$199	?
GeForce GTX 560 Ti	25 January 2011	GF114	40	1950	360	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1024 2048	8	384:64:32	822	1645	4008	26.3	52.61	128.27	GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5 SDRAM is a type of high performance DRAM graphics card memory designed for computer applications requiring high bandwidth...	256	11	4.2	1.1	2.1	1263.4	170	$249	?
GeForce GTX 560 Ti	1 December 2011	GF110	40	?	?	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1280	14	448:?:?	732	1464	3800	?	41	152	GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5 SDRAM is a type of high performance DRAM graphics card memory designed for computer applications requiring high bandwidth...	320	11	4.2	1.1	2.1	?	210	$399	?
GeForce GTX 570	7 December 2010	GF110	40	3000	520	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1280 2560	15	480:60:40	732	1464	3800	29.28	43.92	152	GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5 SDRAM is a type of high performance DRAM graphics card memory designed for computer applications requiring high bandwidth...	320	11	4.2	1.1	2.0	1405.4	219	$349	?
GeForce GTX 580	9 November 2010	GF110	40	3000	520	1	PCIe 2.0 x16	1536 3072	16	512:64:48	772	1544	4008	37.06	49.41	192.4	GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5 SDRAM is a type of high performance DRAM graphics card memory designed for computer applications requiring high bandwidth...	384	11	4.2	1.1	2.0	1581.1	244	$499	£399
GeForce GTX 590	24 March 2011	GF110 (x2)	40	3000 (x2)	520 (x2)	2	PCIe 2.0 x16	3072	2x16	1024:128:96	607	1215	3414	58.75	77.7	327.7	GDDR5 GDDR5 GDDR5 SDRAM is a type of high performance DRAM graphics card memory designed for computer applications requiring high bandwidth...	2x384	11	4.2	1.1	2.0	2488.3	365	$699	£570

Chipset table

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Overview

Products

Chipset table

See also

External links