GeForce 10 series

Updated on Dec 17, 2024

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Release date May 2016 Architecture Pascal		Codename GP10x Models GeForce GTX Series

Fabrication process and transistors 3.3B 14 nm (GP107)4.4B 16 nm (GP106)7.2B 16 nm (GP104)12B 16 nm (GP102) Entry-level GeForce GTX 1050GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

GeForce GTX 10 Series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia as a successor to the GeForce 900 Series. The Pascal microarchitecture is the successor to the Maxwell microarchitecture and incorporates TSMC's 16 nm FinFET technology. It also incorporates Samsung's 14 nm FinFET technology for Nvidia's GP107 chips.

Architecture

The microarchitecture of the GeForce 10 series is named Pascal, after the 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal, and was presented on May 6, 2016.

Nvidia has announced that the Pascal GP100 GPU will feature four High Bandwidth Memory stacks, allowing a total of 16 GB HBM2 on the highest-end models, 16 nm technology, Unified Memory and NVLink.

New Features in GP10x:

CUDA Compute Capability 6.0 (GP100 only), 6.1 (GP102, GP104, GP106, GP107)

DisplayPort 1.4

HDMI 2.0b

Fourth generation Delta Color Compression

PureVideo Feature Set H hardware video decoding HEVC Main10 (10 bit), Main12 (12 bit) & VP9 hardware decoding (GM200 & GM204 did not support HEVC Main10/Main12 & VP9 hardware decoding)

HDCP 2.2 support for 4K DRM protected content playback & streaming (Maxwell GM200 & GM204 lack HDCP 2.2 support, GM206 supports HDCP 2.2)

NVENC HEVC Main10 10 bit hardware encoding

GPU Boost 3.0

Simultaneous Multi-Projection

HB SLI Bridge Technology

New memory controller with GDDR5X & GDDR5 support (GP102, GP104)

Dynamic load balancing scheduling system. This allows the scheduler to dynamically adjust the amount of the GPU assigned to multiple tasks, ensuring that the GPU remains saturated with work except when there is no more work that can safely be distributed.

Instruction-level preemption. In graphics tasks, the driver restricts this to pixel-level preemption because pixel tasks typically finish quickly and the overhead costs of doing pixel-level preemption are much lower than performing instruction-level preemption. Compute tasks get either thread-level or instruction-level preemption. Instruction-level preemption is useful because compute tasks can take long times to finish and there are no guarantees on when a compute task finishes, so the driver enables the very expensive instruction-level preemption for these tasks.

Triple buffering implemented in the driver level. Nvidia calls this "Fast Sync". This has the GPU maintain three frame buffers per monitor. This results in the GPU continuously rendering frames, and the most recently completely rendered frame is sent to a monitor each time it needs one. This removes the initial delay that double buffering with vsync causes and disallows tearing. The costs are that more memory is consumed for the buffers and that the GPU will consume power drawing frames that might be wasted because two or more frames could possibly be drawn between the time a monitor is sent a frame and the time the same monitor needs to be sent another frame. In this case, the latest frame is picked, causing frames drawn after the previously displayed frame but before the frame that is picked to be completely wasted. This feature has been backported to Maxwell-based GPUs in driver version 372.70.

Volta

After Pascal, the next architecture will be codenamed Volta, after the 18th century Italian physicist Alessandro Volta. Volta was to be the direct successor to Maxwell but in 2014 Nvidia announced that Pascal was following Maxwell "to take advantage of stacked memory and other innovations sooner."

Founders Edition

Announcing the GeForce 10-series products, Nvidia has introduced Founders Edition graphics cards versions both of GTX 1060, 1070, 1080 and 1080 Ti. These are what was previously known as reference cards, that is which were designed and built by Nvidia and not by its authorized board partners. The Founders Edition cards have a die cast machine-finished aluminum body with a single radial fan and a vapor chamber cooling (GTX 1080 only), an upgraded power supply and a new low profile backplate (1070, 1080, 1080 Ti only). Nvidia also released a limited supply of Founders Edition cards for the GTX 1060 that were only available directly from Nvidia's website. Founders Edition cards prices (with the exception of the GTX 1080 Ti) are greater than MSRP of partners cards, however some partners' cards, incorporating a complex design, with liquid or hybrid cooling may cost even more than Founders Edition.

GeForce 10 (10xx) series

Supported display standards are: DP 1.3/1.4, HDMI 2.0b, Dual link-DVI

Supported APIs are: Direct3D 12.0 (12_1), OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 1.2 and Vulkan 1.0

GeForce 10 (10xx) series for notebooks

The biggest highlight to this line of notebook GPUs is the implementation of configured specifications close to (for the GTX 1060-1080) and exceeding (for the GTX1050/1050Ti) that of their desktop counterparts, as opposed to having "cut-down" specifications in previous generations. As a result, the "M" suffix is completely removed from the model's naming schemes, denoting these notebook GPUs to possess similar performance to those made for desktop PCs, including the ability to overclock their core frequencies by the user, something not possible with previous generations of notebook GPUs. This was made possible having lower TDP ratings as compared to their desktop equivalents, making these desktop-level GPUs thermally feasible to be implemented into a notebook chassis with better thermal dissipation solutions.

References

GeForce 10 series Wikipedia

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