Chip maker Nvidia officially launched its latest flagship graphics
processors, the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470, designed with tessellation
performance in mind—a key component of Microsoft's DirectX 11 development
platform for PC games. Tessellation techniques are often used to manage data sets
of polygons and divide them into suitable structures for rendering, and Nvidia
said game developers can take advantage of GeForce GTX 480 GPU's ability to
increase the geometric complexity of models and characters, resulting in a more
richly detailed game environment.
The GTX 480 is joined by the GTX 470 as the first products in the company’s
Fermi line of consumer products. They will be available in mid-April, with the
remainder of the GeForce 400-series lineup being announced in the coming
months, filling out additional performance and price segments. The GTX 480 and
GTX 470 GPUs include support for real-time ray tracing and Nvidia 3D Vision
Surround, which provides an immersive gaming experience.
The company’s PolyMorph Engine, a scalable geometry processing engine built
from the ground up for DirectX 11 tessellation, also includes high-speed 32x
anti-aliasing smooth edges for improved visual quality and is capable of
rendering more than 746M pixels per second at full HD 1080p for a 5,760-by-1,080
gaming experience. Nvidia also offers software that automatically converts more
than 400 games to stereoscopic 3D, part of the company’s 3D Vision Surround
technology that expands the gaming real estate across three monitors in full
stereoscopic 3D.
The processors also boast two times the PhysX technology performance over prior
generation GPUs and feature a GigaThread scheduler, which allows up to 10 times
faster switching between graphics and physics processing, enabling more complex
effects to be rendered in real time. They also offer complete language and API
support, including CUDA C/C++, DirectCompute, OpenCL, Java, Python and Fortran,
for a broad compatibility with GPU-accelerated applications. In addition, the
processors offer full support for GPU computing under Microsoft Windows 7.
Mike Angiulo, general manager of Windows planning and PC ecosystem at
Microsoft, said the GeForce GTX 480 is something they’ve been eagerly
anticipating. "Microsoft designed DirectX 11 for Windows 7 with native
support for GPGPU, tessellation and improved multithreading,” he said. "Nvidia
clearly embraced this and designed the GTX 480 with a scalable tessellation
architecture in a multicore environment to bring game development to a new
level. And, we think developers will be impressed to see how they can truly
take advantage of the power of DX11 to create compelling games, as well as
multimedia applications."
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