GeForce GTX 200 Architectural Design Goals
and Key Capabilities
GeForce GTX 200 GPUs are massively multithreaded, many-core, visual computing
processors that incorporate both a second-generation unified graphics architecture
and an enhanced high-performance, parallel-computing architecture.
Two overarching themes drove GeForce GTX 200 architectural design and are
represented by two key phrases:
“Beyond Gaming”
and
“Gaming Beyond.”
Beyond Gaming
means the GPU has evolved beyond being used primarily for 3D
games and driving standard PC display capabilities. More and more, GPUs are
accelerating non-gaming, computationally-intensive applications for both
professionals and consumers.
Gaming Beyond
means that the GeForce GTX 200 GPUs enable amazing new
gaming effects and dynamic realism, delivering much higher levels of scene and
character detail, more 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 Goals
NVIDIA engineers specified the following design goals for the GeForce GTX 200
GPUs:
Design a processor with up to twice the performance of GeForce 8800
GTX
Rebalance the architecture for future games that use more complex
shaders and more memory
Improve architectural efficiency per watt and per square millimeter
Improve performance for DirectX 10 features such as geometry
shading and stream out
Provide significantly enhanced computation ability for high-
performance CUDA
™
applications and GPU physics
Deliver improved power management capability, including a substantial
reduction in idle power.
GeForce GTX 200 GPUs enable major new graphics and compute capabilities,
providing the most realistic 3D graphics effects ever rendered by GPUs to date,
while also providing nearly a teraflop of computational power.
May 2008 | TB-04044-001_v01
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