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The GeForce 3 was introduced three months after Nvidia acquired the assets of 3dfx. It was marketed as the nFinite FX Engine, and was the first Microsoft Direct3D 8.0 compliant 3D-card. Its programmable shader architecture enabled applications to execute custom visual effects programs in Microsoft Shader language 1.1.
Shader Memory Size Bandwidth DRAM type Bus width Pixel (GP/s) Texture (GT/s) Single precision; GeForce 310 November 27, 2009 GT218 TSMC 40 nm 260 57 PCIe 2.0 x16 589 1402 1000 16:8:4 512 8 DDR2 64 2.356 4.712 44.8 30.5 OEM Card, similar to Geforce 210 GeForce 315 February 2010 GT216 486 100 475 1100 1580 48:16:4 512
The first shader-capable GPUs only supported pixel shading, but vertex shaders were quickly introduced once developers realized the power of shaders. The first video card with a programmable pixel shader was the Nvidia GeForce 3 (NV20), released in 2001. [3] Geometry shaders were introduced with Direct3D 10 and OpenGL 3.2.
The unified shader model uses the same hardware resources for both vertex and fragment processing. In the field of 3D computer graphics, the unified shader model (known in Direct3D 10 as "Shader Model 4.0") refers to a form of shader hardware in a graphical processing unit (GPU) where all of the shader stages in the rendering pipeline (geometry, vertex, pixel, etc.) have the same capabilities.
Cards from such vendors differ on implementing data-format support, such as integer and floating-point formats (32-bit and 64-bit). Microsoft introduced a Shader Model standard, to help rank the various features of graphic cards into a simple Shader Model version number (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc.).
The GeForce 6 series (codename NV40) is the sixth generation of Nvidia's GeForce line of graphics processing units.Launched on April 14, 2004, the GeForce 6 family introduced PureVideo post-processing for video, SLI technology, and Shader Model 3.0 support (compliant with Microsoft DirectX 9.0c specification and OpenGL 2.0).
The GeForce 256 is the original release in Nvidia's "GeForce" product line.Announced on August 31, 1999 and released on October 11, 1999, the GeForce 256 improves on its predecessor by increasing the number of fixed pixel pipelines, offloading host geometry calculations to a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine, and adding hardware motion compensation for MPEG-2 video.
FP16 blending is not part of Shader Model 3.0, but is supported mostly by cards also capable of Shader Model 3.0 (exceptions include the GeForce 6200 series). FP16 blending can be used as a faster way to render HDR in video games. Shader Model 4.0 is a feature of DirectX 10, which has been released with Windows Vista.