Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: Did Nvidia skip the 800 series for graphics cards?
Nvidia has announced that the company skipped the GeForce 800 series for desktop graphics cards, most likely because the GTX 800M series consists of high-end Kepler and low-end Maxwell based components. Instead, Nvidia had announced that the newly renamed GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 will be introduced formally on September 19, 2014.[2]
NVIDIA's BR02 "High Speed Interconnect" (often abbreviated to "HSI") chip was used in their early PCI Express graphics cards, where it acted as a bridge between the PCI Express connection to the computer and the natively AGP GPU. This allowed NVIDIA to release a PCI Express graphics card without redesigning the graphics card's GPU for the new interface.
The major competing brands in graphics hardware are NVidia and AMD. NVidia is known largely in the computer graphics department due to its GeForce brand, whereas AMD is known due to its Radeon brand. These two brands account for largely 100 percent of the graphics hardware market, with NVidia making 4 billion dollars in revenue and AMD generating 6.5 billion in revenue (through all sales, not specifically graphics cards).
The use of a bridge chip allowed Nvidia to release a full complement of PCIe graphics cards without having to redesign them for the PCIe interface. Later, when Nvidia's GPUs were designed to use PCIe natively, the bidirectional bridge chip allowed them to be used in AGP cards.
ATI, initially a critic of the bridge chip, eventually designed a similar mechanism for their own cards.
Originally, XFX produced only Nvidia graphics cards; in 2009, XFX switched to manufacturing ATI (now AMD) graphics cards. While it kept selling Nvidia mid-range cards for some time, it later ceased producing any GeForce graphics cards.
A common misconception about MXM is that certain models of graphics cards (e.g. Nvidia GTX 980M) "is MXM 2.1", and therefore any notebook with a GTX 980M fully implements MXM 2.1. However, this is incorrect. While Nvidia defines a lot of MXM specifications, they do not manufacture or design MXM cards themselves, which mostly consist of a PCB with vRAM and an Nvidia or AMD GPU core. Therefore, any model of GPU can be manufactured in MXM, but a laptop released with any particular graphics card model may or may not implement MXM regardless. This is because it is the decision of the ODM whether or not to implement MXM, not Nvidia's or AMD's.
Zotac's GeForce series includes their slightly modified stock graphic cards and their own Amp! and Amp! Extreme products. Their Amp! and Amp! Extreme series are modified versions of NVIDIA's stock graphics cards that includes a modified cooling system, advertised as quieter.
If the existing source code were extended, MiniGLX could be used by GPGPU applications, using the power of graphics card processors for general, non-graphical tasks, as long as no other driver uses the graphics card. Nvidia has already integrated support for using the graphics processing unit on Nvidia cards for application programming into its proprietary 3D graphic driver.
The Nvidia Quadro Plex is an external graphics processing unit "(Visual Computing System)" designed for large-scale 3D visualizations. The system consists of a box containing a pair of high-end Nvidia Quadro graphics cards featuring a variety of external video connectors. A special PCI Express card is installed in the host computer, and the two are connected by VHDCI cables.
The 7200 GS has the same memory speed as the 7300 GS, and the core frequency is the same as the 7300 LE. It has two pixel pipelines. Nvidia stated that the 7200 GS performance is 50% higher than the latest integrated graphics, it's the slowest card of the GeForce 7 Series and of the GeForce 6 Series but supports HDR and Nvidia PureVideo.
NVIDIA GeForce 7200 GS desktop Graphics Processing Unit was launched in January 2006. The GPU uses Second Generation CineFX Shading architecture, and it is manufactured on 90 nm technological process. The card's graphics frequency is 450 MHz. It also has 2 pixel shaders, 4 texture units, together with 2 ROPs. The GeForce 7200 GS embeds 256 MB of DDR2 memory, utilizing 64 bit bus. The memory is clocked at 400 MHz, which results in 6.4 GB/s memory bandwidth. The GPU supports PCI Express 1.0 interface, and needs a single motherboard slot.
On December 14, 2005, Nvidia acquired ULI Electronics, which at the time supplied third-party southbridge parts for chipsets to ATI, Nvidia's competitor. In March 2006, Nvidia acquired Hybrid Graphics. In December 2006, Nvidia, along with its main rival in the graphics industry AMD (which had acquired ATI), received subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice regarding possible antitrust violations in the graphics card industry.
On November 24, 2009, the USPTO rejected all 17 claims in three Rambus patents that the company asserted against Nvidia in a complaint filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC). However the ITC has announced that out of five patents, Nvidia did violate three of them. Due to this ruling Nvidia faced a potential U.S. import ban on some of its chips used in the nForce, Quadro, GeForce, Tesla, and Tegra series graphics products—nearly every video card type manufactured by Nvidia.
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.
RivaTuner is a freeware overclocking and hardware monitoring program that was first developed by Alexey Nicolaychuk in 1997 for the NVIDIA video cards. It was a pioneering application that influenced (and in some cases was integrated into) the design of subsequent freeware graphics card overclocking and monitoring utilities. It supports nVidia GPUs from the Riva TNT to the GeForce 700 Series, and also has limited support for the ATI/AMD Radeon series of video cards from the Radeon 8500 and above.
Having since acquired 3dfx, Nvidia in 2004 reintroduced the SLI acronym (now Scalable Link Interface) in the GeForce 6 Series. ATI Technologies has also since introduced its own multi-chip implementation, dubbed "CrossFire". Although NVIDIA SLI and ATI Crossfire operate on the original SLI principle of utilizing the power of multiple video cards, the implementation is different, such as NVIDIA requiring graphics cards running the same graphics processor, and an SLI bridge to be connected to the cards. CrossFire, from the Rx 200 series onwards, uses the PCI Express bus instead of a bridge to connect cards together.
Most GPUs are designed with specific usage in mind:As of 2016, the primary suppliers of the GPUs (video chips or chipsets) used in video cards are AMD and Nvidia. In the third quarter of 2013, AMD had a 35.5% market share while Nvidia had a 64.5% market share, according to Jon Peddie Research. In economics, this industry structure is termed a duopoly. AMD and Nvidia also build and sell video cards, which are termed graphics add-in-board (AIBs) in the industry. (See Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units and Comparison of AMD graphics processing units.) In addition to marketing their own video cards, AMD and Nvidia sell their GPUs to authorized AIB suppliers, which AMD and Nvidia refer to as "partners". The fact that Nvidia and AMD compete directly with their customer/partners complicates relationships in the industry. The fact that AMD and Intel are direct competitors in the CPU industry is also noteworthy, since AMD-based video cards may be used in computers with Intel CPUs. Intel's move to APUs may weaken AMD, which until now has derived a significant portion of its revenue from graphics components. As of the second quarter of 2013, there were 52 AIB suppliers. These AIB suppliers may market video cards under their own brands, or produce video cards for private label brands or produce video cards for computer manufacturers. Some AIB suppliers such as MSI build both AMD-based and Nvidia-based video cards. Others, such as EVGA, build only Nvidia-based video cards, while XFX, now builds only AMD-based video cards. Several AIB suppliers are also motherboard suppliers. The largest AIB suppliers, based on global retail market share for graphics cards, include Taiwan-based Palit Microsystems, Hong Kong-based PC Partner (which markets AMD-based video cards under its Sapphire brand and Nvidia-based video cards under its Zotac brand), Taiwan-based computer-maker Asustek Computer (Asus), Taiwan-based Micro-Star International (MSI), Taiwan-based Gigabyte Technology, Brea, California, USA-based EVGA (which also sells computer components such as power supplies) and Ontario, California USA-based XFX. (The parent corporation of XFX is based in Hong Kong.)
In January 2014, GameSpot compared the performance to games running on Windows using identical hardware and settings with an AMD graphics card and a Nvidia graphics card. On the AMD graphics card, they found that "Dota 2", "Left 4 Dead 2" and "" all ran at considerably fewer frames-per-second under SteamOS. "Left 4 Dead 2" also suffered from stuttering, which they attributed to a device driver problem. On the Nvidia graphics card "Metro: Last Light" ran at slightly higher frames per second, and "Dota 2" ran at the same rate. They state that for "Left 4 Dead 2" the Nvidia card actually performed better under SteamOS, but did not specify how as their chart indicated it performed at a lower frame rate. On both cards, "Left 4 Dead 2" and "Dota 2" both had longer load times compared to Windows.
Nvidia officially announced the first graphics card using GDDR5X, the Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1080 on May 6, 2016. Later, the second graphics card to use GDDR5X, the Nvidia Titan X on July 21, 2016, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti on February 28, 2017, and Nvidia Titan Xp on April 6, 2017.
AMD enabled real-time ray-tracing on Vega graphics cards through GPUOpen Radeon ProRender. Nvidia has announced real-time ray-tracing on their Quadro RTX workstation graphics cards. The Nvidia GeForce 20 series of video cards have real-time ray tracing capabilities.
The IdeaCentre K320 was scheduled for launch early in 2010. Top Ten Reviews indicated that the desktop was versatile and one of their favorite desktops for home use. The basic version of the desktop was equipped with an Intel Core i3-530 2.93 GHz processor, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator integrated graphics, 4GB RAM, and a 500GB hard disk drive. The processor could be upgraded to the Intel Core i5-750 2.66 GHz processor, or an Intel Core i7. The graphics card could also be updated to NVIDIA or AMD discrete graphics – an NVIDIA GeForce G310 with 512MB of video RAM, or the ATI Hemlock HD graphics card with support for DirectX11. Hard drive capacity could be expanded to 640GB or 1TB.
Gainward traditionally offers overclockable graphic cards that deviate from the reference specifications set forth by Nvidia, such as their "Golden Sample" range of graphics cards. These cards are overclocked past their stock speeds and tested before they are sold, to ensure quality for customers. Gainward have had success with their "Phantom" series of graphic cards, featuring removable fans.
Omega Drivers were unofficial, third-party device drivers for ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards, created by Angel Trinidad. They differed from the official drivers in that they offer more customization and extra features. They are compatible with some ATI graphics cards and some NVIDIA cards that use Detonator drivers.
The control software from nVidia will not install if no other nVidia products (such as a graphics card, chipset or drive controller) are present in the PC. The software can be installed if the motherboard uses an nVidia chipset, or if an nVidia graphics card is used as the primary display adapter. In a PC with an ATI/AMD graphics card as the primary display adpater, and no nVidia chipset on the motherboard, an option is to install a secondary graphics card with a nVidia GPU.
In February 2008, after Nvidia bought Ageia Technologies and eventually cut off the ability to process PhysX on the AGEIA PPU and NVIDIA GPUs in systems with active ATi/AMD GPUs, it seemed that PhysX went 100% to Nvidia. But in March 2008, Nvidia announced that it will make PhysX an open standard for everyone, so the main graphic-processor manufacturers will have PhysX support in the next generation graphics cards. Nvidia announced that PhysX will also be available for some of their released graphics cards just by downloading some new drivers.
"Accelero" is a trademark of ARCTIC (formerly Arctic Cooling) for its line of graphics card coolers. The Accelero line of coolers are targeted to high-end graphics cards based on GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. The Accelero series utilizes different types of cooling technologies namely air cooling, passive cooling as well as air and liquid combined cooling to offer different options for different customers. In 2006, Accelero X1 and Accelero X2 are the first VGA coolers introduced in the series by the manufacturer. The Accelero series has collaborated in a number of OEM projects with motherboard and video card manufacturers to develop customized graphics card cooling solutions. ARCTIC is the first video card cooler manufacturer to use a copper base for their heatsinks.
In May 2012, ARCTIC released the Accelero Hybrid, which is claimed to be the world’s first graphics card cooler with integrated air and liquid solution in the market.