A refresh of the
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 ...
based GeForce 400 series, the GeForce 500 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 ...
, first released on November 9, 2010 with the GeForce GTX 580.
Its direct competitor was
AMD
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...
's
Radeon HD 6000 Series
The Northern Islands series is a family of GPUs developed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) forming part of its Radeon-brand, based on the 40 nm process. Some models are based on TeraScale 2 (VLIW5), some on the new TeraScale 3 (VLIW4) intro ...
; they were launched approximately a month apart.
Overview
![GTX 590 Cooler](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/GTX_590_Cooler.jpg)
The Nvidia Geforce 500 series
graphics cards
A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...
are significantly modified versions of 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 ...
graphics cards, in terms of performance and
power management
Power management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers, computer CPUs, computer GPUs and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power stat ...
. Like the Nvidia GeForce 400 series graphics cards, the Nvidia Geforce 500 series supports
DirectX
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", ...
11.0,
OpenGL
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
4.6, and
OpenCL
OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-progra ...
1.1.
The refreshed Fermi chip includes 512
stream processors, grouped in 16 stream multiprocessors clusters (each with 32
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 ...
cores), and is 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 ...
in a 40
nm process.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics card is the first in the Nvidia GeForce 500 series to use a fully enabled chip based on the refreshed Fermi architecture, with all 16 stream multiprocessors clusters and all six
64-bit memory controllers active. The new GF110 GPU was enhanced with full speed FP16 filtering (the previous generation GF100 GPU could only do half-speed FP16 filtering) and improved
z-culling units.
On January 25, 2011, Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, to target the "sweet spot"
segment where price/performance ratio is considered important. With its more than 30% improvement over the GTX 460, and performance in between the Radeon HD 6870 and 6950 1GB, the GTX 560 Ti directly replaced the GeForce GTX 470.
On February 17, 2011, it was reported that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti would be launching on March 15, 2011. Although the GTX 550 Ti is a GF116 mainstream chip, Nvidia chose to name its new card the GTX 550 Ti, and not the GTS 550. Performance was shown to be at least comparable and up to 12% faster than the current Radeon HD 5770. Price-wise, the new card trod into the range occupied by the GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB) and the Radeon HD 6790.
On March 24, 2011, the GTX 590 was launched as the flagship graphics card for Nvidia. The GTX 590 is a dual-GPU card, similar to past releases such as the GTX 295, and boasted the potential to handle Nvidia's 3D Vision technology by itself.
On April 13, 2011, the GT 520 was launched as the bottom-end card in the range, with lower performance than the equivalent number cards in the two previous generations, the GT 220 and the GT 420. However, it supported DirectX 11 and was more powerful than the GeForce 210, the GeForce 310, and the integrated graphics options on Intel CPUs.
On May 17, 2011, Nvidia launched a less expensive (non-Ti) version of the GeForce GTX 560 to strengthen Nvidia's price-performance in the $200 range. Like the faster GTX 560 Ti that came before it, this video card was also faster than the GeForce GTX 460. Standard versions of this card performed comparably to the AMD Radeon HD 6870, and would eventually replace the GeForce GTX 460. Premium versions of this card operate at higher speed (factory overclocked), and are slightly faster than the Radeon 6870, approaching the performance of basic versions of the Radeon HD 6950 and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti.
On November 28, 2011, Nvidia launched the "GTX560Ti With 448 Cores". However, it does not use the silicon of the GTX560 series: it is a GF110 chip with two shader blocks disabled. The most powerful version of the 560 series, this card was widely known to be a "limited production" card and was used as a marketing tool making use of the popularity of the GTX560 brand for the 2011 Holiday season. The performance of the card resides between the regular 560Ti and 570.
Counterfeit usage
The cards of this generation, particularly the smaller length 550 Ti model, are common cards of choice by counterfeit re-sellers, who take the cards and edit their BIOS chips to have them report as more modern cards such as the GTX 1060 and 1050 Ti models. These cards are then sold via
eBay
eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...
,
Taobao
Taobao () is a Chinese online shopping platform. It is headquartered in Hangzhou and is owned by Alibaba. According to Alexa rank, it is the eighth most-visited website globally in 2021. Taobao.com was registered on April 21, 2003 by Alibaba Cl ...
,
Aliexpress and
Wish.Com by the scammer. They may have a minimum of functionality to ensure at a first glance they appear legitimate, but defects caused by the fake BIOS, manufacturing and software issues will almost always cause crashes in modern games and applications, and if not, the performance will still be extremely poor.
Products
![EVGA GeForce GTX 590](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/EVGA_GeForce_GTX_590.jpg)
GeForce 500 (5xx) series
*
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
*
2 Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) in the GPU of GF110 architecture contains 32 SPs and 4 SFUs. Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) in the GPU of GF114/116/118 architecture contains 48 SPs and 8 SFUs. Each SP can fulfil up to two single precision operations FMA per clock. Each SFU can fulfil up to four operations SF per clock. The approximate ratio of operations FMA to operations SF is equal 4:1. The theoretical shader performance in single-precision floating point operations (FMA)
sp'', FLOPS">GFLOPS
In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...
] of the graphics card with shader count [''n''] and shader frequency [''f'', GHz], is estimated by the following: ''FLOPS
sp'' ˜ f × n × 2. Alternative formula: ''FLOPS
sp'' ˜ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA)).
'm''– SM count. Total Processing Power: ''FLOPS
sp'' ˜ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA) + 4 × 4 SFUs) or ''FLOPS
sp'' ˜ f × n × 2.5.
*
3 Each SM in the GF110 contains 4 texture filtering units for every texture address unit. The complete GF110 die contains 64 texture address units and 256 texture filtering units. Each SM in the GF114/116/118 architecture contains 8 texture filtering units for every texture address unit but has doubled both addressing and filtering units.
All products are produced using a 40 nm fabrication process.
All products support DirectX 12.0, OpenGL 4.6 and OpenCL 1.1.
GeForce 500M (5xxM) series
The GeForce 500M series for notebook architecture.
*
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 drivers, it will no longer release
32-bit drivers for 32-bit operating systems.
Nvidia announced in April 2018 that Fermi will transition to legacy driver support status and be maintained until January 2019.
See also
*
GeForce 200 series
The GeForce 200 series is a series of Tesla-based GeForce graphics processing units developed by Nvidia.
Architecture
The GeForce 200 Series introduced Nvidia's second generation of Tesla (microarchitecture), Nvidia's unified shader architec ...
*
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 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 ...
Notes
*
References
External links
GeForce GTX 590GeForce GTX 580GeForce GTX 570GeForce GTX 560 TiGeForce GTX 560 Ti (OEM)GeForce GTX 560GeForce GTX 560 (OEM)GeForce GTX 550 TiGeForce GT 545 GDDR5 (OEM)GeForce GT 545 DDR3GeForce GT 530 (OEM)GeForce GT 520GeForce GT 520 (OEM)GeForce 510 (OEM)GeForce GTX 580MGeForce GTX 570MGeForce GTX 560MGeForce GT 555MGeForce GT 550MGeForce GT 540MGeForce GT 525MGeForce GT 520MXGeForce GT 520MNvidia NsighttechPowerUp! GPU Database
{{DEFAULTSORT:Geforce 500 Series
Computer-related introductions in 2010
500 series
Graphics cards