GeForce

GeForce
Top: Logo since 2022
Bottom: The most recent flagship model, the GeForce RTX 4090, in the Founders Edition in its retail box
Release dateAugust 31, 1999; 25 years ago (1999-08-31)
Manufactured by
Designed byNvidia
Marketed byNvidia
Models
CoresUp to 16,384 CUDA cores
Fabrication process220 nm to 3 nm
History
PredecessorRIVA TNT2
VariantNvidia Quadro, Nvidia Tesla

GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia and marketed for the performance market. As of the GeForce 40 series, there have been eighteen iterations of the design. The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for add-on graphics boards, intended for the high-margin PC gaming market, and later diversification of the product line covered all tiers of the PC graphics market, ranging from cost-sensitive[1] GPUs integrated on motherboards, to mainstream add-in retail boards. Most recently,[when?] GeForce technology[vague] has been introduced into Nvidia's line of embedded application processors, designed for electronic handhelds and mobile handsets.

With respect to discrete GPUs, found in add-in graphics-boards, Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon GPUs are the only remaining competitors in the high-end market. GeForce GPUs are very dominant in the general-purpose graphics processor unit (GPGPU) market thanks to their proprietary Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA).[2] GPGPU is expected to expand GPU functionality beyond the traditional rasterization of 3D graphics, to turn it into a high-performance computing device able to execute arbitrary programming code in the same way a CPU does, but with different strengths (highly parallel execution of straightforward calculations) and weaknesses (worse performance for complex branching code).

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Nvdia Geforce was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Otterness, Nathan; Anderson, James H. (2020). AMD GPUs as an Alternative to NVIDIA for Supporting Real-Time Workloads (PDF). 32nd Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs). Vol. 165. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik. pp. 10:1–10:23. doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2020.10.