The GeForce 500 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, as a refresh of the Fermi based GeForce 400 series. It was first released on November 9, 2010 with the GeForce GTX 580.
Its direct competitor was AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series; they were launched approximately a month apart.
Overview
GTX 590 with shroud removed
The Nvidia Geforce 500 series graphics cards are significantly modified versions of the GeForce 400 series graphics cards, in terms of performance and power management. Like the Nvidia GeForce 400 series graphics cards, the Nvidia Geforce 500 series supports DirectX 11.0,OpenGL 4.6, and OpenCL 1.1.
The refreshed Fermi chip includes 512 stream processors, grouped in 16 stream multiprocessors clusters (each with 32 CUDA cores), and is manufactured by TSMC in a 40 nm process.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics card is the first in the Nvidia GeForce 500 series to use a fully enabled chip based on the refreshed Fermi architecture, with all 16 stream multiprocessors clusters and all six 64-bit memory controllers active. The new GF110 GPU was enhanced with full speed FP16 filtering (the previous generation GF100 GPU could only do half-speed FP16 filtering) and improved z-culling units.
On January 25, 2011, Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, to target the "sweet spot" segment where price/performance ratio is considered important. With its more than 30% improvement over the GTX 460, and performance in between the Radeon HD 6870 and 6950 1GB, the GTX 560 Ti directly replaced the GeForce GTX 470.
On February 17, 2011, it was reported that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti would be launching on March 15, 2011. Although the GTX 550 Ti is a GF116 mainstream chip, Nvidia chose to name its new card the GTX 550 Ti, and not the GTS 550. Performance was shown to be at least comparable and up to 12% faster than the current Radeon HD 5770. Price-wise, the new card trod into the range occupied by the GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB) and the Radeon HD 6790.[2]
On March 24, 2011, the GTX 590 was launched as the flagship graphics card for Nvidia. The GTX 590 is a dual-GPU card, similar to past releases such as the GTX 295, and boasted the potential to handle Nvidia's 3D Vision technology by itself.[3]
On April 13, 2011, the GT 520 was launched as the bottom-end card in the range, with lower performance than the equivalent number cards in the two previous generations, the GT 220 and the GT 420.[citation needed] However, it supported DirectX 11 and was more powerful than the GeForce 210, the GeForce 310, and the integrated graphics options on Intel CPUs.
On May 17, 2011, Nvidia launched a less expensive (non-Ti) version of the GeForce GTX 560 to strengthen Nvidia's price-performance in the $200 range. Like the faster GTX 560 Ti that came before it, this video card was also faster than the GeForce GTX 460. Standard versions of this card performed comparably to the AMD Radeon HD 6870, and would eventually replace the GeForce GTX 460. Premium versions of this card operate at higher speed (factory overclocked), and are slightly faster than the Radeon 6870, approaching the performance of basic versions of the Radeon HD 6950 and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti.
On November 28, 2011, Nvidia launched the "GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores".[4] However, it does not use the silicon of the GTX 560 series: it is a GF110 chip with two shader blocks disabled. The most powerful version of the 560 series, this card was widely known to be a "limited production" card and was used as a marketing tool making use of the popularity of the GTX 560 brand for the 2011 Holiday season. The performance of the card resides between the regular 560 Ti and 570.
Counterfeit usage
The cards of this generation, particularly the smaller length 550 Ti model, are common cards of choice by counterfeit resellers, who take the cards and illicitly modify the firmware to have them report as more modern cards such as the GTX 1060 and 1050 Ti models. These cards are then sold via eBay, Taobao, Aliexpress and Wish.com by scammers. They may have a minimum of functionality to ensure at a first glance they appear legitimate, but defects caused by the fake BIOS, manufacturing and software issues will almost always cause crashes in modern games and applications, and if not, the performance will still be extremely poor.[5]
2 Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) in the GPU of GF110 architecture contains 32 SPs and 4 SFUs. Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) in the GPU of GF114/116/118 architecture contains 48 SPs and 8 SFUs. Each SP can fulfil up to two single precision operations FMA per clock. Each SFU can fulfil up to four operations SF per clock. The approximate ratio of operations FMA to operations SF is equal 4:1. The theoretical shader performance in single-precision floating point operations (FMA)[FLOPSsp, GFLOPS] of the graphics card with shader count [n] and shader frequency [f, GHz], is estimated by the following: FLOPSsp ˜ f × n × 2. Alternative formula: FLOPS sp ˜ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA)). [m] – SM count. Total Processing Power: FLOPSsp ˜ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA) + 4 × 4 SFUs) or FLOPSsp ˜ f × n × 2.5.
3 Each SM in the GF110 contains 4 texture filtering units for every texture address unit. The complete GF110 die contains 64 texture address units and 256 texture filtering units.[6] Each SM in the GF114/116/118 architecture contains 8 texture filtering units for every texture address unit but has doubled both addressing and filtering units.
All products are produced using a 40 nm fabrication process.
All products support DirectX 12.0, OpenGL 4.6 and OpenCL 1.1.
GeForce 500M (5xxM) series
The GeForce 500M series for notebook architecture.
^ a bEach SM in the GF110 contains 4 texture filtering units for every texture address unit. The complete GF110 die contains 64 texture address units and 256 texture filtering units.[8] Each SM in the GF114/116/118 architecture contains 8 texture filtering units for every texture address unit but has doubled both addressing and filtering units.
^ a b c d eSimilar to previous generation, GTX 580 and most likely future GTX 570,[needs update] while reflecting its improvement over GF100, still have lower rated TDP and higher power consumption, e.g. GTX 580 (243W TDP) is slightly less power hungry than GTX 480 (250W TDP). This is managed by clock throttling through drivers when a dedicated power hungry application is identified that could breach card TDP. Application name changing will disable throttling and enable full power consumption, which in some cases could be close to that of GTX 480.[9]
^ a b1024 MB RAM on 192-bit bus assemble with 4 x (128 MB) + 2 x (256 MB).
^ a b cInternally referred to as GF104B[13]
^ a b c dInternally referred to as GF100B[13]
^Some companies have announced that they will be offering the GTX 580 with 3GB RAM.[15]
Discontinued support
Nvidia announced that after Release 390 drivers, it will no longer release 32-bit drivers for 32-bit operating systems.[17]
Nvidia announced in April 2018 that Fermi will transition to legacy driver support status and be maintained until January 2019.[18]
^"Graphics Cards, Gaming, Laptops, and Virtual Reality from NVIDIA GeForce".
^"GF110: Fermi Learns Some New Tricks - Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined". Anandtech.com. Archived from the original on January 13, 2016. Retrieved December 11, 2015.
^"Power, Temperature, and Noise - Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined". Anandtech.com. Archived from the original on January 13, 2016. Retrieved December 11, 2015.
^"NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 SE Specs". Retrieved August 6, 2018.[dead link]
^ a b"...and GF110s real name is: GF100B". GPU-Tech.org. Archived from the original on January 13, 2016. Retrieved December 11, 2015.
^ a bRyan Smith (November 9, 2010). "Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined". AnandTech. Archived from the original on November 10, 2010. Retrieved November 9, 2010.
^"Products - Featured Products". EVGA. Archived from the original on March 24, 2012. Retrieved December 11, 2015.
^"Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 1536 MB Review". TechPowerUp. November 9, 2010. Archived from the original on December 22, 2015. Retrieved December 11, 2015.
^"Support Plan for 32-bit and 64-bit Operating Systems | NVIDIA".
^"Support Plan for Fermi series GeForce GPUs | NVIDIA".
