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The GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 support 1,024 MB and 896 MB of 
frame buffer respectively, a two-fold improvement from over prior generation 
GPUs. With 1 GB of frame buffer, high-resolution antialiasing performance is 
dramatically improved. For example, deferred rendered games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 
can now be enjoyed with antialiasing. 

Geometry Shading and Stream Out 

Internal output buffer structures have been significantly upsized by a factor of 6× in 
GeForce GTX 200 GPUs compared to the prior generation, providing much faster 
geometry shading and stream out performance. Figure 8 shows the latest RightMark 
3D 2.0 benchmark results, including geometry shading tests. The GeForce GTX 
280 GPU is significantly faster than prior generation NVIDIA GPUs and 
competitive products. 

Geometry Shader Performance

Rightmark 3D 2.0 - Hyperlight Heavy

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 Figure 8: Geometry Shading Performance 

Our own Medusa demo is highly dependent on the much faster geometry and 
stream out performance.  

512-bit Memory Interface 

Maximum memory interface width is expanded from 384 bits in previous-generation 
GPUs to 512 bits in GeForce GTX 200 GPUs, using eight 64-bit-wide frame buffer 
interface units. Memory bandwidth has been significantly increased. 
In terms of rebalancing the architecture versus prior generations, the texture to 
frame buffer (TEX:FB) bandwidth ratio has also been modified to best support 
current and future workloads. NVIDIA engineers tested many applications to arrive 

 

 

May 2008  |  TB-04044-001_v01 

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Summary of Contents for GeForce GTX 200 GPU

Page 1: ...Technical Brief NVIDIA GeForce GTX 200 GPU Architectural Overview Second Generation Unified GPU Architecture for Visual Computing...

Page 2: ...Processing Architecture 10 Parallel Computing Architecture 12 SIMT Architecture 13 Greater Number of Threads in Flight 13 Larger Register File 14 Improved Dual Issue 15 Double Precision Support 15 Im...

Page 3: ...ure 10 Figure 5 GeForce GTX 280 GPU Parallel Computing Architecture 12 Figure 6 TPC Thread Processing Cluster 13 Figure 7 Local Register File 2 versus 1 14 Figure 8 Geometry Shading Performance 17 Tab...

Page 4: ...perience We ll begin by describing architectural design goals and key features and then dive into the technical implementation of the GeForce GTX 200 GPUs We assume you have a basic understanding of f...

Page 5: ...e natural character motion and very accurate and convincing physics effects The GeForce GTX 200 GPUs are designed to be fully compliant with Microsoft DirectX 10 and Open GL 2 1 Architectural Design G...

Page 6: ...luding Convincing facial and character animation Multiple ultra high polygon characters in complex environments Advanced volumetric effects smoke fog mist etc Fluid and cloth simulation Fully simulate...

Page 7: ...it color output Gaming Beyond SLI NVIDIA s SLI technology is the industry s leading multi GPU technology giving you an easy low cost high impact performance upgrade PC gaming simply doesn t get any fa...

Page 8: ...coding application from Elemental and various video and photo editing applications Many engineering scientific medical and financial areas demand high performance computational horsepower for numerous...

Page 9: ...ure consists of a number of TPCs which stands for Texture Processing Clusters in graphics processing mode and Thread Processing Clusters in parallel compute mode Each TPC is in turn made up of a numbe...

Page 10: ...imates show 20 of the transistors of a CPU are dedicated to computation compared to 80 of GPU transistors GPU processing is centered on computation and throughput where CPUs focus heavily on reducing...

Page 11: ...heoretical performance limits than could prior generations Table 2 compares the GeForce 8800 GTX to the new GeForce GTX 280 GPU You will notice sizable increases in a number of important measurable pa...

Page 12: ...perform atomic read modify write operations to memory Atomic access provides granular access to memory locations and facilitates parallel reductions and parallel data structure management Figure 5 Ge...

Page 13: ...utilized at all times From the programmer s perspective SIMT also allows each thread to take on its own path Since branching is handled by the hardware there is no need to manually manage branching wi...

Page 14: ...Series GPUs The older GPUs could run into situations with long shaders where registers would be exhausted generating the need to swap to memory A much larger register file permits larger and more comp...

Page 15: ...EE 754R floating point specification compliant The overall double precision performance of all 10 TPCs of a GeForce GTX 280 GPU is roughly equivalent to an eight core Xeon CPU yielding up to 78 gigafl...

Page 16: ...ng quality The new GeForce GTX 200 GPU ROP subsystem supports all of the previous generation features and delivers a maximum of 32 pixels per clock output equating to 4 pixels clock per ROP partition...

Page 17: ...cantly faster than prior generation NVIDIA GPUs and competitive products Geometry Shader Performance Rightmark 3D 2 0 Hyperlight Heavy http www ixbt com video itogi video ini rmdx10 rar 0 100 200 300...

Page 18: ...iver can seamlessly switch between the power modes based on utilization of the GPU Each of the new GeForce GTX 200 GPUs integrates utilization monitors digital watchdogs that constantly check the amou...

Page 19: ...age Setup rates are similar to prior generation supporting up to one primitive per clock Z Culling performance has also been improved especially at high resolutions Early Z rejection rates have been i...

Page 20: ...uffer memory access Improvements in on chip communications between various units Improved Z cull and compression supporting higher performance at high resolutions and 10 bit color support These all re...

Page 21: ...ed number of pixel processing units and a fixed number of vertex processing units This same unified architecture provided the framework for efficient high end computation using NVIDIA CUDA software te...

Page 22: ...CPUs and GeForce 8800 GTS 512 were run on Asus P5K V motherboard Intel G33 based with 2 GB DDR2 system memory Based on an extrapolation of 1 min 50 sec 1280 720 high definition movie clip 4 http devel...

Page 23: ...hat may result from its use No license is granted by implication or otherwise under any patent or patent rights of NVIDIA Corporation Specifications mentioned in this publication are subject to change...

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