The Pascal microarchitecture, named afterBlaise Pascal, was announced in March 2014 as a successor to theMaxwell microarchitecture.[4] 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 nmFinFET (TSMC) or 14 nm FinFET (Samsung) 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).[5]
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)[6]
NVENC HEVC Main10 10 bit hardware encoding (except GP108 which doesn't support NVENC[8])
GPU Boost 3.0
Simultaneous Multi-Projection
HB SLI Bridge Technology
New memory controller with GDDR5X & GDDR5 support (GP102, GP104, GP106)[9]
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.[10]
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.[11]
Triple buffering 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 thatdouble 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.[12] This feature has been backported to Maxwell-based GPUs in driver version 372.70.[13]
Starting withWindows 10 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.
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 asreference 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[16]), an upgraded power supply and a new low profile backplate (1070, 1070 Ti, 1080, 1080 Ti only).[17] Nvidia also released a limited supply of Founders Edition cards for the GTX 1060 that were only available directly from Nvidia's website.[18] Founders Edition cards prices (with the exception of the GTX 1070 Ti and 1080 Ti) are greater thanMSRP of partners cards; however, some partners' cards, incorporating a complex design, withliquid or hybrid cooling may cost more than Founders Edition.
Due to production problems surrounding theRTX 30-series cards and a general shortage of graphics cards due to production issues caused by the ongoingCOVID-19 pandemic, which led to aglobal shortage of semiconductor chips, and general demand for graphics cards increasing due to an increase incryptocurrency mining, the GTX 1050 Ti, alongside the RTX 2060 and its Super counterpart,[19] was brought back into production in 2021.[20][21]
In addition, Nvidia quietly released the GeForce GT 1010 in January 2021.[22]
^In OpenCL 3.0, OpenCL 1.2 functionality has become a mandatory baseline, while all OpenCL 2.x and OpenCL 3.0 features were made optional.
^The Nvidia Titan Xp & the Founders Edition GTX 1080 Ti does not have a dual link DVI port, but a DisplayPort to single link DVI adapter is included in the box.
^abThe number of streaming multiprocessors on the GPU.
^abcGTX 1060 and GTX 1080 cards shipped after April 2017 feature increased memory speeds, thus increasing memory bandwidth.
^abPixel fillrate is calculated as the lowest of three numbers: number of ROPs multiplied by the base core clock speed, number of rasterizers multiplied by the number of fragments they can generate per rasterizer multiplied by the base core clock speed, and the number of streaming multiprocessors multiplied by the number of fragments per clock that they can output multiplied by the base clock rate.
^abTexture fillrate is calculated as the number of TMUs multiplied by the base core clock speed.
^abSLI HB only supports a maximum of 2-way SLI using SLI HB bridges, however if using traditional SLI bridges it can support a maximum of 4-way SLI but the performance is mostly improved in synthetic benchmarks only.
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 lowerThermal 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).[citation needed]
Supported APIs are:Direct3D 12 (feature level 12_1 or 11_0 on MX110 and MX130),OpenGL 4.6,OpenCL 3.0 andVulkan 1.3
^The number of streaming multiprocessors on the GPU.
^Pixel fillrate is calculated as the lowest of three numbers: number of ROPs multiplied by the base core clock speed, number of rasterizers multiplied by the number of fragments they can generate per rasterizer multiplied by the base core clock speed, and the number of streaming multiprocessors multiplied by the number of fragments per clock that they can output multiplied by the base clock rate.
^Texture fillrate is calculated as the number of TMUs multiplied by the base core clock speed.
Nvidia stopped releasing 32-bit drivers for 32-bit operating systems after driver 391.35 in March 2018.[73]
Nvidia announced that after release of the 470 drivers, it would transition driver support for theWindows 7 andWindows 8.1 operating systems to legacy status and continue to provide critical security updates for these operating systems through September 2024.[74] 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 January 2025, Nvidia has announced plans to wind down developer support for the Pascal architecture, which includes the GTX 10-Series. While CUDA support will be deprecated in a future release, driver updates are expected to continue for a limited time.[75]
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