The GeForce 10 series is a series of

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

s developed by

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

, 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 series The GeForce GTX 16 series is a series of graphics processing units (GPUs) developed by Nvidia, based on the Turing microarchitecture, announced in February 2019. The GeForce GTX 16 series, commercialized within the same timeframe as the GeFor ...

and

GeForce 20 series The GeForce RTX 20 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. Serving as the successor to the GeForce 10 series, the line started shipping on September 20, 2018, and after several editions, on July 2, 2019, the GeForc ...

using the Turing microarchitecture.

Architecture

The Pascal microarchitecture, named after

Blaise Pascal Blaise Pascal (19June 162319August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic Church, Catholic writer. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. His earliest ...

, was announced in March 2014 as a successor to the Maxwell microarchitecture. The first graphics cards from the series, the GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070, were announced on May 6, 2016, and were released several weeks later on May 27 and June 10, respectively. The architecture incorporates either 16 nm

FinFET A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the chann ...

(

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is one of the world's most valuable semiconductor companies, the world' ...

) or 14 nm FinFET (

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

) technologies. Initially, chips were only produced in TSMC's 16 nm process, but later chips were made with Samsung's newer 14 nm process (GP107, GP108). New Features in GP10x: *

CUDA In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...

Compute Capability 6.0 (GP100 only), 6.1 (GP102, GP104, GP106, GP107, GP108) *

DisplayPort DisplayPort (DP) is a digital interface used to connect a video source, such as a Personal computer, computer, to a display device like a Computer monitor, monitor. Developed by the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), it can also car ...

1.4 (No DSC) *

HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary digital interface used to transmit high-quality video and audio signals between devices. It is commonly used to connect devices such as televisions, computer monitors, projectors, gam ...

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 High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is a form of digital copy protection developed by Intel Corporation to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as it travels across connections. Types of connections include DisplayPort ...

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

NVENC NVENC (short for Nvidia Encoder) is a feature in Nvidia graphics cards that performs Data compression, video encoding, offloading this compute-intensive task from the Central processing unit, CPU to a dedicated part of the Graphics processing uni ...

HEVC Main10 10 bit hardware encoding (except GP108 which doesn't support NVENC) * GPU Boost 3.0 * Simultaneous Multi-Projection * HB SLI Bridge Technology * New memory controller with GDDR5X & GDDR5 support (GP102, GP104, GP106) * 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. Nvidia therefore has safely enabled asynchronous compute in Pascal's driver. * 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 In computer science, multiple buffering is the use of more than one buffer (computer science), buffer to hold a block of data, so that a "readers-writers problem, reader" will see a complete (though perhaps old) version of the data instead of a pa ...

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. Nvidia has announced that the Pascal GP100 GPU will feature four

High Bandwidth Memory High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a computer memory interface for 3D-stacked synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) initially from Samsung, AMD and SK Hynix. It is used in conjunction with high-performance graphics accelerators, network ...

stacks, allowing a total of 16 GB HBM2 on the highest-end models, 16 nm technology, Unified Memory and

NVLink NVLink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications protocol, communications link developed by Nvidia. Unlike PCI Express, a device can consist of multiple NVLinks, and devices use mesh networking to communicate instead of a central ...

. Starting with

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. The successor to Windows 8.1, it was Software release cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on July 2 ...

version 2004, support has been added for using a hardware graphics scheduler to reduce latency and improve performance, which requires a driver level of WDDM 2.7.

Products

Founders Edition

Announcing the GeForce 10 series products, Nvidia introduced Founders Edition graphics card versions of the GTX 1060, 1070, 1070 Ti, 1080 and 1080 Ti. These are what were previously known as ''reference'' cards, i.e. which were designed and built by Nvidia and not by its authorized board partners. These cards were used as reference to measure performance of partner cards. The Founders Edition cards have a die cast machine-finished aluminum body with a single radial fan and a vapor chamber cooling (1070 Ti, 1080, 1080 Ti only), an upgraded power supply and a new low profile backplate (1070, 1070 Ti, 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 1070 Ti and 1080 Ti) are greater than MSRP of partners cards; however, some partners' cards, incorporating a complex design, with

liquid Liquid is a state of matter with a definite volume but no fixed shape. Liquids adapt to the shape of their container and are nearly incompressible, maintaining their volume even under pressure. The density of a liquid is usually close to th ...

or hybrid cooling may cost more than Founders Edition.

GeForce 10 (10xx) series for desktops

* Supported display standards are: DP 1.3/1.4, HDMI 2.0b, dual link DVI * Supported APIs are:

Direct3D Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware ...

12 (feature level 12_1),

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

4.6,

OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a software framework, framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), di ...

3.0 and

Vulkan Vulkan is a cross-platform API and open standard for 3D graphics and computing. It was intended to address the shortcomings of OpenGL, and allow developers more control over the GPU. It is designed to support a wide variety of GPUs, CPUs and o ...

1.3

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 GTX 1050/1050 Ti) 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 by having lower Thermal Design Power (TDP) ratings as compared to their desktop equivalents, making these desktop-level GPUs thermally feasible to be implemented into OEM notebook chassis with improved thermal dissipation designs, and, as such, are only available through the OEMs. In addition, the entire line of GTX Notebook GPUs also are available in lower-TDP and quieter variations called the "Max-Q Design", specifically made for ultra-thin gaming systems in conjunction with OEM Partners that incorporate enhanced heat dissipation mechanisms with lower operating noise volumes, which are also made available as an additional more powerful option to existing gaming notebooks as well, which was launched on 27 June 2017. In addition, the GT series line of Notebook GPUs is no longer introduced starting from this generation, replaced by the MX series of Notebook GPUs. Only the MX150 is based on Pascal's GP108 die used on the GT1030 for Desktops, with higher clock frequencies compared to its Desktop counterpart, while the other chips in the MX series were re-branded versions of the previous generation GPUs (MX130 is a re-branded GT940MX GPU while MX110 is a re-branded GT920MX GPU). * Supported APIs are:

12 (feature level 12_1 or 11_0 on MX110 and MX130),

4.6,

3.0 and

1.3 * Only GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 have SLI support.

Reintroduction

Due to production problems surrounding the RTX 30-series cards and a general shortage of graphics cards due to production issues caused by the ongoing

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, which led to a global shortage of semiconductor chips, and general demand for graphics cards increasing due to an increase in

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...

mining, the GTX 1050 Ti, alongside the RTX 2060 and its Super counterpart, was brought back into production in 2021. In addition, Nvidia quietly released the GeForce GT 1010 in January 2021.

Discontinued support

Nvidia stopped releasing 32-bit drivers for 32-bit operating systems after driver 391.35 in March 2018. Nvidia announced that after release of the 470 drivers, it would transition driver support for the

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

and Windows 8.1 operating systems to legacy status and continue to provide critical security updates for these operating systems through September 2024. The GeForce 10 series is the last Nvidia GPU generation to support Windows 7/8.x or any 32-bit operating system; beginning with the Turing architecture, newer Nvidia GPUs now require a 64-bit operating system. In May 2025, Nvidia discontinued developer support for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, which includes the GTX 10 Series. Driver updates are expected to continue for a limited time.

References

External links

Official website

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 whitepaper
* {{NVIDIA Computer-related introductions in 2016 1000 Series Graphics processing units Graphics cards Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on science and technology