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ABSTRACT

The previous chapter described how GPU architecture has changed as a result of computational and communications trends in microprocessing. This chapter describes the architecture of the GeForce 6 Series GPUs from NVIDIA, which owe their formidable computational power to their ability to take advantage of these trends. Most notably, we focus on the GeForce 6800 (NVIDIA's flagship GPU at the time of writing, shown in Figure 30-1), which delivers hundreds of gigaflops of single-precision floating-point computation, as compared to approximately 12 gigaflops for current high-end CPUs. In this chapter---and throughout the book---reference to GeForce 6 Series GPUs should be read to include the latest Quadro FX GPUs supporting Shader Model 3.0, which provide a superset of the functionality offered by the GeForce 6 Series. We start with a general overview of where the GPU fits into the overall computer system, and then we describe the architecture along with details of specific features and performance characteristics.