The GeForce 700 series (stylized as GEFORCE GTX 700 SERIES) is a series of
graphics processing unit
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...
s developed by
Nvidia
Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...
. While mainly a refresh of the
Kepler microarchitecture (GK-codenamed chips), some cards use
Fermi
Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and ...
(GF) and later cards use
Maxwell (GM). GeForce 700 series cards were first released in 2013, starting with the release of the GeForce GTX Titan on February 19, 2013, followed by the GeForce GTX 780 on May 23, 2013. The first mobile GeForce 700 series chips were released in April 2013.
Overview
GK110 was designed and marketed with computational performance in mind. It contains 7.1 billion transistors. This model also attempts to maximise energy efficiency through the execution of as many tasks as possible in parallel according to the capabilities of its streaming processors.
With GK110, increases in memory space and bandwidth for both the register file and the L2 cache over previous models, are seen. At the SMX level, GK110's register file space has increased to 256KB composed of 64K 32bit registers, as compared to Fermi's 32K 32bit registers totaling 128 KB. As for the L2 cache, GK110 L2 cache space increased by up to 1.5MB, 2x as big as GF110. Both the L2 cache and register file bandwidth have also doubled.
Performance in register-starved scenarios is also improved as there are more registers available to each thread. This goes in hand with an increase of total number of registers each thread can address, moving from 63 registers per thread to 255 registers per thread with GK110.
With GK110, Nvidia also reworked the GPU
texture cache
This is a glossary of terms relating to computer graphics.
For more general computer hardware terms, see glossary of computer hardware terms.
0–9
A
B
...
to be used for compute. With 48KB in size, in compute the texture cache becomes a read-only cache, specializing in unaligned memory access workloads. Furthermore, error detection capabilities have been added to make it safer for use with workloads that rely on
ECC.
The series also supports
DirectX 12
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...
on
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
.
Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) was added to Kepler GPUs with the latest Nvidia drivers.
Architecture
The GeForce 700 series contains features from both GK104 and GK110. Kepler based members of the 700 series add the following standard features to the GeForce family.
Derived from GK104:
*
PCI Express 3.0 interface
*
DisplayPort
DisplayPort (DP) is a digital display interface developed by a consortium of PC and chip manufacturers and standardized by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA). It is primarily used to connect a video source to a display device su ...
1.2
*
HDMI
High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device, such as a display controller, ...
1.4a 4K x 2K video output
*
Purevideo VP5 hardware video acceleration (up to 4K x 2K H.264 decode)
* Hardware H.264 encoding acceleration block (NVENC)
* Support for up to 4 independent 2D displays, or 3 stereoscopic/3D displays (NV Surround)
* Bindless Textures
* GPU Boost
* TXAA
* Manufactured by
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational corporation, multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semicon ...
on a 28 nm process
New Features from GK110:
* Compute Focus SMX Improvement
*
CUDA
CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ca ...
Compute Capability 3.5
* New Shuffle Instructions
* Dynamic Parallelism
* Hyper-Q (Hyper-Q's MPI functionality reserve for Tesla only)
* Grid Management Unit
* NVIDIA GPUDirect (GPU Direct's RDMA functionality reserve for Tesla & Quadro only)
* GPU-Boost 2.0
Compute focus SMX improvement
With GK110, Nvidia opted to increase compute performance. The single biggest change from GK104 is that rather than 8 dedicated FP64 CUDA cores, GK110 has up to 64, giving it 8x the FP64 throughput of a GK104 SMX. The SMX also sees an increase in space for register file. Register file space has increased to 256KB compared to Fermi. The texture cache are also improved. With a 48KB space, the texture cache can become a read-only cache for compute workloads.
New shuffle Instructions
At a low level, GK110 sees additional instructions and operations to further improve performance. New shuffle instructions allow for threads within a warp to share data without going back to memory, making the process much quicker than the previous load/share/store method. Atomic operations are also overhauled, speeding up the execution speed of atomic operations and adding some FP64 operations that were previously only available for FP32 data.
NVENC
Hyper-Q
Hyper-Q expands GK110 hardware work queues from 1 to 32. The significance of this being that having a single work queue meant that Fermi could be under occupied at times as there wasn't enough work in that queue to fill every SM. By having 32 work queues, GK110 can in many scenarios, achieve higher utilization by being able to put different task streams on what would otherwise be an idle SMX. The simple nature of Hyper-Q is further reinforced by the fact that it's easily map to MPI, a common message passing interface frequently used in HPC. As legacy MPI-based algorithms that were originally designed for multi-CPU systems that became bottlenecked by false dependencies now have a solution. By increasing the number of MPI jobs, it's possible to utilize Hyper-Q on these algorithms to improve the efficiency all without changing the code itself.
Microsoft DirectX support
Nvidia Kepler GPUs of the GeForce 700 series fully support DirectX 11.0.
Nvidia supports the DX12 API on all the DX11-class GPUs it has shipped; these belong to the Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell architectural families.
Dynamic parallelism
Dynamic parallelism ability is for kernels to be able to dispatch other kernels. With Fermi, only the CPU could dispatch a kernel, which incurs a certain amount of overhead by having to communicate back to the CPU. By giving kernels the ability to dispatch their own child kernels, GK110 can both save time by not having to go back to the CPU, and in the process free up the CPU to work on other tasks.
Products
GeForce 700 (7xx) series
The GeForce 700 series for desktop architecture. Cheaper and lower performing products were expected to be released over time. Kepler supports 11.1 features with 11_0 feature level through the DirectX 11.1 API, however Nvidia did not enable four non-gaming features in Hardware in Kepler (for 11_1).
*
1 Shader Processors :
Texture mapping unit
In computer graphics, a texture mapping unit (TMU) is a component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs). They are able to rotate, resize, and distort a bitmap image to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D model as a texture, in a ...
s :
Render output unit
In computer graphics, the render output unit (ROP) or raster operations pipeline is a hardware component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs) and one of the final steps in the rendering process of modern graphics cards. The pixel pipelines ...
s
*
2 Pixel fillrate is calculated as the number of ROPs multiplied by the base core clock speed
*
3 Texture fillrate is calculated as the number of TMUs multiplied by the base core clock speed.
*
4 Single precision performance is calculated as 2 times the number of shaders multiplied by the base core clock speed.
*
5 Double precision performance of the GTX Titan and GTX Titan Black is either 1/3 or 1/24 of single-precision performance depending on a user-selected configuration option in the driver that boosts single-precision performance if double-precision is set to 1/24 of single-precision performance, while other Kepler chips' double precision performance is fixed at 1/24 of single-precision performance. GeForce 700 series Maxwell chips' double precision performance is 1/32 of single-precision performance.
*
6 SLI supports connecting up to 4 identical graphics cards for a 4-way SLI configuration. Those supporting 4-way SLI can support 3-way & 2-way SLI, however a dual-GPU card already implements 2-way SLI internally, thus only 2 dual-GPU cards can be used in SLI to give a 4-way SLI configuration.
GeForce 700M (7xxM) series
Some implementations may use different specifications.
*
1 Unified shaders :
Texture mapping unit
In computer graphics, a texture mapping unit (TMU) is a component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs). They are able to rotate, resize, and distort a bitmap image to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D model as a texture, in a ...
s :
Render output unit
In computer graphics, the render output unit (ROP) or raster operations pipeline is a hardware component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs) and one of the final steps in the rendering process of modern graphics cards. The pixel pipelines ...
s
Chipset table
Discontinued support
Nvidia announced that after Release 390.x drivers, it will no longer release 32-bit drivers for 32-bit operating systems.
Nvidia announced that Kepler notebook GPUs will transition to legacy support from April 2019 onwards and be supported until April 2020. All notebook GPUs from the 7xxM family are affected by this change.
Nvidia announced that after Release 470 drivers, it would transition driver support for the Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 operating systems to legacy status and continue to provide critical security updates for these operating systems through September 2024.
Nvidia announced that all remaining Kepler desktop GPUs would transition to legacy support from September 2021 onwards and be supported for critical security updates through September 2024. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 745, 750 and 750 Ti from the 7xx desktop GPU family would not be affected by this change.
In Windows the last driver to fully support CUDA with 64-Bit Compute Capability 3.5 for Kepler in Windows 7 & Windows 8.1 64-bit is 388.71,
tested with latest CUDA-Z and GPU-Z, after that driver, the 64-Bit CUDA support becomes broken for GeForce 700 series GK110 with Kepler architecture.
The last driver where monitor type detection is working properly on Windows XP is 352.86.
See also
*
GeForce 400 series
Serving as the introduction of Fermi, the GeForce 400 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. Its release was originally slated in November 2009; however, after delays, it was released on March 26, 2010 with availabi ...
*
GeForce 500 series
A refresh of the Fermi based GeForce 400 series, the GeForce 500 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, first released on November 9, 2010 with the GeForce GTX 580.
Its direct competitor was AMD's Radeon HD 6000 S ...
*
GeForce 600 series
The GeForce 600 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, first released in 2012. They served as the introduction of the Kepler architecture.
Overview
Where the goal of the previous architecture, Fermi, was to inc ...
*
GeForce 800M series
The GeForce 800M series is a family of graphics processing units by Nvidia for laptop PCs. It consists of rebrands of mobile versions of the GeForce 700 series and some newer chips that are lower end compared to the rebrands.
The GeForce 800 s ...
*
GeForce 900 series
The GeForce 900 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 700 series and serving as the high-end introduction to the Maxwell microarchitecture, named after James Clerk Maxwell. They are produced ...
*
GeForce 10 series
The GeForce 10 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, initially based on the Pascal microarchitecture announced in March 2014. This design series succeeded the GeForce 900 series, and is succeeded by the GeForce 16 se ...
*
Nvidia Quadro
Quadro was Nvidia's brand for graphics cards intended for use in workstations running professional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-generated imagery (CGI), digital content creation (DCC) applications, scientific calculations and machine l ...
*
Nvidia Tesla
Nvidia Tesla was the name of Nvidia's line of products targeted at stream processing or general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began using GPUs from the G80 ser ...
Notes
References
External links
GK110/GK210 Architecture WhitepaperGTX 750 Ti WhitepaperIntroducing GeForce GTX TITAN Z: Ultimate PowerIntroducing the GeForce GTX TITANIntroducing The GeForce GTX 780 Ti: The Best Gaming GPU on the PlanetIntroducing The GeForce GTX 780Introducing The GeForce GTX 770Introducing The GeForce GTX 760: A Mid-Range GPU With High-End FeaturesGeForce GTX 750 Class GPUs: Serious Gaming, Incredible ValueIntroducing Our New GeForce GTX 700M, Kepler-Powered Notebook GPUsGeForce GTX TITAN ZGeForce GTX TITAN BLACKGeForce GTX TITANGeForce GTX 780 TiGeForce GTX 780GeForce GTX 770GeForce GTX 760 Ti (OEM)GeForce GTX 760GeForce GTX 760 192-bit(OEM)GeForce GTX 750 TiGeForce GTX 750GeForce GT 740GeForce GT 730GeForce GX 780MGeForce GX 770MGeForce GX 765MGeForce GX 760MGeForce GT 750MGeForce GT 745MGeForce GT 740MGeForce GT 735MGeForce GT 730MA New DawnNvidia NsightTechPowerUp! GPU Database
{{Nvidia
Computer-related introductions in 2013
700 series
Graphics cards