Foundation
Three people co-founded NVIDIA in 1993:
- Jen-Hsun Huang (As of 2013 CEO), a Taiwanese-born American, previously Director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
- Chris Malachowsky, an electrical engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems.
- Curtis Priem, previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at Sun Microsystems.
Some early history
In the early years of PC gaming, everything was 2D, with good examples being Doom and Descent. This is were NVIDIA steps in. In the late 1990s, 3D acceleration video cards started to spring up, namely from NVIDIA and its then rivals NEC (PowerVR), 3dfx (Voodoo) and ATI (Rage).
NVIDIA's first product, the NV1, was a quadratic surface based card. The card was developed with a integrated sound card, and game ports for Sega Saturn's gamepads. Although the NV1 wasn't a complete success, it wasn't a failure at all, so NVIDIA continued expansion on the quadratic surface design, and dubbed it the NV2. NVIDIA's key supporter in its early years was Sega, which released several near arcade quality PC ports for the NV1 and NV2 cards, such as Virtua Fighter Remix and Virtua Cop.
In mid-design of the NV2, Microsoft released DirectX, a polygon based API (Application Programming Interfaces). This directly conflicted with NVIDIA's thoughts that quadratic surfaces were the way to go, and with the combination of this and Sega's abondoning of quadratic surface theory, NVIDIA switched game plans. This switch came with the introduction of the RIVA 128 and it's future brothers.
NVIDIA later goes on to develop the RIVA TNT, and then RIVA TNT2. With the success of these products nVidia took the next step, and aquired it's rival 3dfx (Voodoo Graphics). This wasn't the last step for NVIDIA, as they moved on the aquire other industry leading companies like ULi Electronics, and Ageia Technologies (AGEIA PhsyX).
With a revenue reaching as high as $4.1 Billion NVIDIA is going strong with it's production of Motherboard, Videocard, portable music player, and phsyics chips and chipsets. Now the leading developer in graphics card, and motherboard designs it's hard to see NVIDIA being taken down anytime soon.
Nvidia GeForce Series:
Desktop:
600 Series:
Reference Card | CUDA Cores | Base Clock (Mhz) | Boost Clock (Mhz) | Texture Fill Rate (Billion/sec) |
---|
GTX Titan | 2688 | 837 | 876 | 187.5 |
GTX 690 | 3072 | 915 | 1019 | 234 |
GTX 680 | 1536 | 1006 | 1058 | 128.8 |
GTX 670 | 1344 | 915 | 980 | 102.5 |
GTX 660 Ti | 1344 | 915 | 980 | 102.5 |
GTX 660 (OEM) | 1152 | 823 | 888 | 79 |
GTX 660 | 960 | 680 | 1033 | 78.4 |
GTX 650 Ti Boost | 768 | 980 | 1033 | 62.7 |
GTX 650 Ti | 768 | 928 | n/a | 59.2 |
GTX 650 | 384 | 1058 | n/a | 33.9 |
500 Series:
Reference card | Cuda Cores | Memory | SLI | BUS | Width | DirectX |
---|
GTX 590 | 1024 | 3072MB GDDR5 768 bits | Quad | PCIe 2.0 | Dual-slot | DX 11 |
GTX 580 | 512 | 1536 MB GDDR5 384-bit | 2-way/3-way | PCIe 2.0 x16 | Dual-slot | DX 11 |
400 Series:
Refence card | CUDA Cores | Memory | SLI | BUS | Width | DirectX |
---|
GTX 480 | 480 | 1536 MB GDDR5 384-bit | 2-way/3-way | PCI-e 2.0 x16 | Dual-slot | DX 11 |
GTX 470 | 448 | 1280 MB GDDR5 320-bit | 2-way/3-way | PCI-e 2.0 x16 | Dual-slot | DX 11 |
GTX 465 | 352 | 1024 MB GDDR5 256-bit | 2-way/3-way | PCI-e 2.0 x16 | Dual-slot | DX 11 |
200 Series:
GTX 295 [240 stream processors (x2)] [896mb-GDDR3 (x2)] [448-bit (x2)] [SLI (2)]
GTX 285 [240 stream processors] [1024mb-GDDR3] [512-bit] [SLI (3)]
GTX 280 [240 stream processors] [1024mb-GDDR3] [512-bit] [SLI (3)]
GTX 275 [240 stream processors] [896mb-GDDR3] [448-bit] [SLI (3)]
GTX 260 [216 or 192 stream processors] [896mb-GDDR3] [448-bit] [SLI (3)]
GTS 250 [128 stream processors] [1024 or 512mb-GDDR3] [256-bit] [SLI (3)]
9 Series:
9800 GX2 [128 stream processors (x2)] [512mb-GDDR3 (x2)] [256-bit (x2)] [SLI (2)]
9800 GTX [128 stream processors] [1024 or 512mb-GDDR3] [256-bit] [SLI (3)]
9800 GTX [128 stream processors] [1024 or 512mb-GDDR3] [256-bit] [SLI (3)]
9800 GTS [128 stream processors] [512mb-GDDR3] [256-bit] [SLI (3)]
9800 GT [128 stream processors] [1024 or 512mb-GDDR3] [256-bit] [SLI (2)]
9600 GT
9500 GT
8 Series:
8800 ULTRA [128 stream processors] [768mb-GDDR3] [384-bit] [SLI (3)]
8800 GTX [128 stream processors] [768mb-GDDR3] [384-bit] [SLI (2)]
8800 GTS [128 stream processors] [512 or 640 or 320 mb-GDDR3] [512 or 320-bit] [SLI (2)]
8800 GT
8800 GS
8600 GTS
8600 GT
8600 GS
8500 GT
8400 GS
8300 GS7 Series:
7950 GX2
7950 GT
7900 GX2
7900 GTO
7900 GTX
7900 GT
7900 GS
7800 GTX
7800 GT
7800 GS
7600 GT
7600 GS
7500 LE
7300 GT
7300 GS
7200 LE
7300 SE
7200 GS
7100 GS
6 Series:
6800 Ultra
6800 GT
6800 GS
6800
6800 XT
6800 XE
6800 LE
6800 GTO
6600 GT
6600
6600 LE
6500
6200
6200 (TurboCache)
6200 LE
6100
6150
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