Pascal (microarchitecture)

Pascal

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti of the GeForce 10-line of graphics-cards, was the final major iteration featuring the Pascal microarchitecture (GP102-350-K1-A1).
Launched	May 27, 2016; 8 years ago (2016-05-27)
Designed by	Nvidia
Manufactured by	TSMC Samsung
Fabrication process	TSMC 16FF Samsung 14 nm
Codename(s)	GP10x
Product Series
Desktop	GeForce GTX 10 series
Professional/workstation	Quadro P
Server/datacenter	Tesla P4
Specifications
L1 cache	24 KB (per SM)
L2 cache	256 KB—4 MB
Memory support	GDDR5 GDDR5X HBM2
PCIe support	PCIe 3.0
Supported Graphics APIs
DirectX	DirectX 12 (12.1)
Direct3D	Direct3D 12.0
Shader Model	Shader Model 6.7
OpenCL	OpenCL 3.0
OpenGL	OpenGL 4.6
CUDA	Compute Capability 6.0
Vulkan	Vulkan 1.3
Media Engine
Encode codecs	H.264 H.265
Decode codecs	H.264 H.265 VP9
Color bit-depth	8-bit 10-bit
Encoder(s) supported	NVENC
Display outputs	DisplayPort 1.4a HDMI 2.0b DVI
History
Predecessor	Maxwell
Successor	Turing (consumer) Volta (professional)

Pascal is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, as the successor to the Maxwell architecture. The architecture was first introduced in April 2016 with the release of the Tesla P100 (GP100) on April 5, 2016, and is primarily used in the GeForce 10 series, starting with the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 (both using the GP104 GPU), which were released on May 27, 2016, and June 10, 2016, respectively. Pascal was manufactured using TSMC's 16 nm FinFET process,^[1] and later Samsung's 14 nm FinFET process.^[2]

The architecture is named after the 17th century French mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal.

In April 2019, Nvidia enabled a software implementation of DirectX Raytracing on Pascal-based cards starting with the GTX 1060 6 GB, and in the 16 series cards, a feature reserved to the Turing-based RTX series up to that point.^[3][4]