The GeForce 200 series is a series of
Tesla-based
GeForce
GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia. As of the GeForce 40 series, there have been eighteen iterations of the design. The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for add-on graphics boards, inten ...
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 ...
.
Architecture
The GeForce 200 Series introduced Nvidia's second generation of
Tesla (microarchitecture)
Tesla is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 2006, as the successor to Curie microarchitecture. It was named after the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. As Nvidia's first microarchitecture to ...
, Nvidia's
unified shader architecture; the first major update to it since introduced with the
GeForce 8 Series.
The GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 are based on the same processor core. During the manufacturing process, GTX chips were binned and separated through defect testing of the core's logic functionality. Those that fail to meet the GTX 280 hardware specification are re-tested and binned as GTX 260 (which is specified with fewer stream processors, less
ROPs
Rops may refer to:
People
* Daniel-Rops (1901–1965), French writer and historian
* Félicien Rops (1833–1898), Belgian artist
Places
* Rops (peak), a mountain in Kosovo
Sports
* Rovaniemen Palloseura (RoPS), a Finnish football club
Tech ...
and a narrower memory bus).
In late 2008, Nvidia re-released the GTX 260 with 216 stream processors, up from 192. Effectively, there were two GTX 260 cards in production with non-trivial performance differences.
The GeForce 200 series GPUs (GT200a/b GPU), excluding GeForce GTS 250, GTS 240 GPUs (these are older G92b GPUs), have
double precision
Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point.
Flo ...
support for use in
GPGPU
General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...
applications. GT200 GPUs also have improved performance in
geometry shading.
, the GT200 is the seventh largest commercial GPU ever constructed, consisting of 1.4 billion transistors covering a 576 mm
2 die surface area built on a
65 nm process. It is the fifth largest
CMOS
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...
-logic chip that has been fabricated at the
TSMC foundry. The
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 ...
have since superseded the GT200 chips in transistor count, but the original GT200 dies still exceed the GF100 die size. It is larger than even the
Kepler
Johannes Kepler (; ; 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws o ...
-based GK210 GPU used in the Tesla K80, which has 7.1 billion transistors on a 561 mm
2 die manufactured in
28 nm. The Ampere GA100 is currently the largest commercial GPU ever fabricated at 826 mm
2 with 54.2 billion transistors.
Nvidia officially announced and released the retail version of the previously OEM only GeForce 210 (GT218 GPU) and GeForce GT 220 (GT216 GPU) on October 12, 2009. Nvidia officially announced and released the GeForce GT 240 (GT215 GPU) on November 17, 2009. The new
40nm GPUs feature the new
PureVideo
PureVideo is Nvidia's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding. PureVideo is integrated into some of the Nvidia GPUs, and it supports hardware decoding of multiple video codec standards: MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, HEVC, and AV1. PureVideo occu ...
HD VP4 decoder hardware in them, as the older GeForce 8 and 9 GPUs only have PureVideo HD VP2 or VP3 (G98). They also support Compute Capability 1.2, whereas older GeForce 8 and 9 GPUs only supported Compute Capability 1.1. All GT21x GPUs also contain an audio processor inside and support 8 channel
LPCM
Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the amp ...
output through
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, ...
.
Chipset table
GeForce 200 Series
![Gtx260](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Gtx260.jpg)
All models support Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing, Angle-Independent Anisotropic Filtering, 240-bit OpenEXR HDR.
*
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
Features
Compute Capability: 1.1 (G92
TS250GPU)
Compute Capability: 1.2 (GT215, GT216, GT218 GPUs)
Compute Capability: 1.3 has
double precision
Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point.
Flo ...
support for use in
GPGPU
General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...
applications. (GT200a/b GPUs only)
GeForce 200M (2xxM) Series
The GeForce 200M Series is a graphics processor architecture for notebooks.
*
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
Discontinued support
NVIDIA has ceased driver support for GeForce 200 series on April 1, 2016.
EOL driver support for legacy products
/ref>
* Windows XP 32-bit & Media Center Edition: version 340.52 released on July 29, 2014
Download
* Windows XP 64-bit: version 340.52 released on July 29, 2014
Download
* Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 32-bit: version 342.01 (WHQL) released on December 14, 2016
Download
* Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 64-bit: version 342.01 (WHQL) released on December 14, 2016
Download
* Windows 10, 32-bit: version 342.01 (WHQL) released on December 14, 2016
Download
* Windows 10, 64-bit: version 342.01 (WHQL) released on December 14, 2016
Download
* Linux, 64-bit: version 340.108 released on December 23, 2019
Download
See also
* GeForce 8 series
* GeForce 9 series
The GeForce 9 series is the ninth generation of Nvidia's GeForce series of graphics processing units, the first of which was released on February 21, 2008. Products are based on a slightly repolished Tesla microarchitecture, adding PCIe 2. ...
* GeForce 100 series
The GeForce 100 series is a series of Tesla-based graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, first released in March 2009. Its cards are rebrands of GeForce 9 series cards, available only for OEMs. However, the GTS 150 was briefly available ...
* GeForce 300 series
The GeForce 300 series is a series of Tesla-based graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, first released in November 2009. Its cards are rebrands of the GeForce 200 series cards, available only for OEMs. All GPUs of the series support D ...
* 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 700 series
The GeForce 700 series (stylized as GEFORCE GTX 700 SERIES) is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. While mainly a refresh of the Kepler microarchitecture (GK-codenamed chips), some cards use Fermi (GF) and later cards us ...
* 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 ...
* List of Nvidia graphics processing units
This list contains general information about graphics processing units (GPUs) and video cards from Nvidia, based on official specifications. In addition some Comparison of Nvidia nForce chipsets, Nvidia motherboards come with integrated onboard GPU ...
References
External links
GeForce GTX 295
Geforce gtx 295
Nvidia Nsight
{{DEFAULTSORT:Geforce 200 Series
200 series
Graphics cards
Computer-related introductions in 2008