GEFORCE

'GeForce' is a brand of PC graphics chipsets designed by NVIDIA. The first GeForce products were designed and marketed for the high-margin computer gamer community, but later the product's releases expanded the product line to cover all tiers of the graphics market, from low-end to high-end. As of 2007, there have been eight iterations of the design.

Contents

Name origin

Generations

Mobile chipsets

Product naming scheme

The loop (reboot) error in Windows XP

See also

References

External links

Name origin

The "GeForce" name originated from a contest held by NVIDIA in early 1999. Called "Name That Chip", the contest called out to the public to name the successor to the RIVA TNT2 line of graphics boards. There were over 12,000 entries received and 7 winners received a RIVA TNT2 Ultra graphics board as a reward. ^[1][2]

Generations

; GeForce 256 : Launched in August 1999, the GeForce 256 (NV10) was the first PC graphics chip with hardware transform, lighting, and shading although 3D games utilizing this feature did not appear until later. Initial GeForce256 boards shipped with SDRAM memory, and later boards shipped with faster DDR memory.
; GeForce 2 : Launched in April 2000, the first GeForce2 (NV15) was another high-performance graphics chip. NVIDIA moved to a twin texture processor per pipeline (4x2) design, doubling texture fillrate per clock compared to GeForce 256. Later, NVIDIA released the cost-reduced GeForce2 MX which offered a compelling value in the low/mid-range market segments and was popular with OEM PC manufacturers and users alike.
; GeForce 3 : Launched in February 2001, the GeForce3 (NV20) introduced DirectX 8.0 programmable pixel shaders to the GeForce family. It had good overall performance and shader support, making it popular with enthusiasts although it never hit the midrange price point. Technology developed for the GeForce3 later emerged in the Microsoft Xbox game console.
; GeForce 4 : Launched in February 2002, the high-end GeForce4 Ti (NV25) was mostly a refinement to the GeForce3. The biggest advancements included enhancements to anti-aliasing capabilities, an improved memory controller, a second vertex shader, and a manufacturing process size reduction to increase clock speeds. A later "family member," the budget GeForce4 MX, was a GeForce2 MX with a few additions from the new GeForce4 Ti line. It targeted the value segment of the market.
; GeForce FX : Officially launched in November 2002, the GeForce FX (NV30) was a huge change in architecture compared to its predecessors. The GPU was designed not only to support the new Shader Model 2 specification but also to perform well on older DirectX 7 and 8 titles. NVIDIA marketed the cards as "the dawn of cinematic rendering". Products in this series carry the 5000 model number, therefore this is also known as the GeForce 5 Series.
; GeForce 6 : Launched in April 2004, the GeForce 6 (NV40) added Shader Model 3.0 support to the GeForce family, while correcting the weak floating point shader performance of its predecessor. It also implemented high dynamic range imaging and introduced SLI (Scalable Link Interface) and PureVideo capability.
; GeForce 7 : The 7th generation GeForce (G70/NV47) was launched in June 2005. The design was a refined version of GeForce 6, with the major improvements being a widened pipeline and an increase in clock speed. The GeForce 7 also offers new transparency supersampling and transparency multisampling anti-aliasing modes (TSAA and TMAA). These new anti-aliasing modes were later enabled for the GeForce 6 series as well.
:A modified version of GeForce 7800GTX called the RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' is used as the main GPU in the PlayStation 3 from Sony.
; GeForce 8 : Released on November 8 2006, the 8th generation GeForce (G80) is the first ever GPU to fully support DirectX 10. Built on a brand new architecture, it has a fully unified shader architecture. Benchmark testing has produced strong results against top-of-the-line GPUs from competitor ATI. It is the latest GPU line released thus far from the company. The GeForce 8800 Ultra is currently the most powerful GPU in the world, based on raw shader power.

Mobile chipsets

Since the GeForce 2, NVIDIA has produced a number of counterpart designs for notebook computers, such as the GeForce Go, a notebook graphics processing unit (GPU).
In most cases, the GeForce Go products are very similar in feature set and performance to their desktop counterparts. Currently, models range from the lower end GeForce 7300 to the high-end performance GeForce 7900 GS and 7950 GTX (However, these cards are only available from certain manufacturers on select models).
As for the latest 8 series, the mobile parts will carry a suffix "M", instead of using the old GeForce Go branding.

Product naming scheme

The company has followed a naming scheme that relates each product to a market segment.

★ ¹: Suffixes indicate its performance layer, and those listed are in order from weakest to most powerful

★ ²: Shader reduction compares that particular model range to the highest model possible in the generation.

Number range	Category	Suffixes1	Price range	Shader reduction2	Memory			Outputs	Example products
					Type	Width (bit)	Size (MiB)
000-400	Budget	LE, GS	≤$150	≤50%	DDR2	64 or 128	≤512MB	VGA/DVI	GeForce 7300GS, GeForce 6200
500-600	Midrange	GS, GT, GTS	$100-$300	25%-50%	DDR2, GDDR3	128 or 256	256MB-512MB	VGA/DVI Two DVI	GeForce 6600GT, GeForce 8600GTS
700-950	High-end	GS, GT, GTS, GTX, GX2, Ultra	≥$200	0%-25%	GDDR3 or GDDR4	≥256	≥256MB	Two DVI	GeForce 8800 Ultra, GeForce 7950 GX2

When a new generation comes out, the video cards in the previous generation usually degrade in their standing. That is, when the GeForce 8800 GTX (a current high-end card) was released, the GeForce 7900 GTX (the previous high-end card) could be considered a midrange card. But in lot of cases, the degradation doesn't happen dramatically. For example, the GeForce 7950 GX2 can still be considered high end compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX.

The loop (reboot) error in Windows XP

As reported in countless forums (including Nvidia's own), GeForce 5 and up (and specifically 'nv4_disp.dll' and 'nv4_mini.sys') cause a memory overflow in certain systems. While Nvidia has yet to release drivers that fix it, Microsoft points its customers to Nvidia or ask them to move to a new card^[3]. However, VIA Technologies released its own beta patch^[4] under the name '"Test_driver1.zip"'. While having no official site or page, it is a ZIP file that is hosted in VIA's site and is linked from many forums. Alternatively, some forum users upload it themselves under the name '"nv4loopfix.zip"'.

See also

★ Comparison of NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units

★ Graphics card

★ Graphics processing unit

★ Radeon

References

1. Winners of the NVIDIA Naming Contest
2. nVidia "Name that chip" contest
3. Error message: STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER, support.microsoft.com
4. What is the loop error?, viaarena.com

External links

★ GeForce product page on NVIDIA's website