Nvidia GeForce GTX 400 Series Graphics Cards
Nvidia’s internal name for the GeForce 400 series architecture is “Fermi”, named for Enrico Fermi the Italian Physicist who was critical in the development of the nuclear reactor. The name is appropriate because this video card series represents the state of the art technology in PC graphics rendering. With 16 Streaming Multiprocessors, each capable of 32 simultaneous single-precision operations, 64k of on-board cache / shared memory and 768k of L2 cache this processor goes beyond the merely impressive to deliver sheer jaw dropping performance. Any serious PC gamer will want to get their hands on one of these cards.
Previously high performance users largely had been using cards using Nvidia’s G80 architecture, like the Tesla series of general purpose GPU’s. Fermi graphics cards represents the next evolution in cutting edge performance and delivers even more power. The 400 series begins a new age in performance video card architecture and what home computer graphics cards are capable of. Available with anywhere from 1GB to 4GB of RAM for each of the GDDR5 controllers, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400 Series Graphics Cards will offer high performance users up to 6GB total on board memory dedicated to graphics processing. Nvidia has taken their previous breakthroughs in video processing architecture and used them as a building block to get to the next level with the 400 series.
The 400 series is also the first chip from graphics card guru Nvidia to work with Microsoft’s new DirectX 11. This new system paves the way for a new generations of hyper-realistic games and extreme 3d rendering. Taking lighting and shaders to the next level, the 3 dimensional environments which can be rendered on the fly by Nvidia’s GeForce 400 series are simply breathtaking. Nvidia’s new architecture also includes better support for C++ programming language and Microsoft’s Visual Studio. In brief, this means the architecture is more straightforward for computer programmers to get maximum performance from.
One of the first of the new line of video cards released with this new architecture is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480. This card offers a core clock speed of 700MHz and a shader clock speed of 1401 MHz, plus 1.5GB of on board video RAM. This unit, along with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470, is just the tip of the iceberg for the new architecture. Nvidia has a long history of pushing the envelope with their graphics processing technologies and while cards like the GTX 480 blow away the graphical capabilities of cards that have come before, later models in the GeForce 400 Series will deliver performance even beyond that. More. Better. Faster. That’s what the Nvidia GeForce 400 Series Graphics Cards delivers.