Nvidia Corporation
Type	Public (NASDAQ: NVDA)
Founded	1993
Headquarters	2701 San Tomas Expressway Santa Clara, California USA, additional locations in Europe and Asia
Key people	Jen-Hsun Huang, Co-founder, President and CEO Chris A. Malachowsky, Co-founder, Nvidia Fellow, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Operations Jonah M. Alben, Vice President, GPU Engineering Debora Shoquist, Senior Vice President, Operations
Industry	Semiconductors- Specialized
Products	Graphics processing units motherboard-chipsets
Revenue	▲$3.77 Billion USD (2007)
Net income	▲$704.2 Million USD (2007)
Employees	over 4,083 (as of 2007)
Slogan	The Way It's Meant to Be Played
Website	www.nvidia.com

The American multinational Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) (pronounced /ɛnˈvɪda/) specializes in the manufacture of graphics-processor technologies for workstations, desktop computers, and handheld devices. The company, based in Santa Clara, California, has become a major supplier of integrated circuits (ICs) used for personal-computer motherboard chipsets, graphics processing units (GPUs), and game-consoles. Notable product lines include the GeForce series for gaming and the Quadro series for graphics processing on professional workstations, as well as the nForce series of integrated motherboard-chipsets. Image File history File links NVIDIA_Logo. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... NASDAQ in Times Square, New York City. ... Location of Santa Clara within Santa Clara County, California. ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Motto: (traditional) In God We Trust (official, 1956–present) Anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington, D.C. Largest city New York City Official language(s) None at the federal level; English de facto Government Federal Republic  - President George W. Bush (R)  - Vice President Dick Cheney (R) Independence - Declared - Recognized... For other uses, see Europe (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Asia (disambiguation). ... Jen-Hsun Huang Jen-Hsun Huang (黃仁勳; pinyin: Huáng RénxÅ«n) (born February 17, 1963) co-founded NVIDIA Corporation in 1993 and is currently the CEO and President. ... President is a title held by many leaders of organizations, companies, trade unions, universities, and countries. ... “Chief executive” redirects here. ... A semiconductor is a material that is an insulator at very low temperature, but which has a sizable electrical conductivity at room temperature. ... Concept B is a specialization of concept A if and only if: every instance of concept B is also an instance of concept A; and there are instances of concept A which are not instances of concept B. For instance, Bird is a specialization of Animal because every bird is... A Graphics Processing Unit or GPU, also called Visual Processing Unit or VPU is the microprocessor of a graphics card (or graphics accelerator). ... A motherboard is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer. ... Chipset refers to a group of integrated circuits (chips) that are designed to work together, and are usually marketed as a single product. ... For the tax agency in Ireland of the same name, see Revenue Commissioners. ... USD redirects here. ... Net income is equal to the income that a firm has after subtracting costs and expenses from the total revenue. ... USD redirects here. ... This article is about work. ... 2007 is a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Look up slogan in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A website (alternatively, Web site or web site) is a collection of Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that is hosted on one or several Web server(s), usually accessible via the Internet, cell phone or a LAN. A Web page is a document, typically written in HTML... United States may refer to: Places: United States of America SS United States, the fastest ocean liner ever built. ... A multinational corporation (or transnational corporation) (MNC/TNC) is a corporation or enterprise that manages production establishments or delivers services in at least two countries. ... NASDAQ in Times Square, New York City. ... “GPU” redirects here. ... Sun SPARCstation 1+, 25 MHz RISC processor from early 1990s A workstation, such as a Unix workstation, RISC workstation or engineering workstation, is a high-end desktop or deskside microcomputer designed for technical applications. ... Bold text Desktop computer with several common peripherals (Monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, microphone and a printer) A desktop computer is a gay electronic machine computer which convert raw data into meaningful information, made for use on a desk in an office or home and is distinguished from portable computers such... A mobile device (also known as converged device, handheld device, handheld computer, Palmtop or simply handheld) is a pocket-sized computing device, typically comprising a small visual display screen for user output and a miniature keyboard or touch screen for user input. ... Location of Santa Clara within Santa Clara County, California. ... A motherboard is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer. ... Diagram of a motherboard chipset A chipset is a group of integrated circuits, or chips, that are designed to work together, and are usually marketed as a single product. ... “GPU” redirects here. ... Game console redirects here. ... GeForce is a brand of PC graphics chipsets designed by NVIDIA. The first GeForce products were designed and marketed for the high-margin computer gamer community, but later the products releases expanded the product line to cover all tiers of the graphics market, from low-end to high-end. ... What is Quadro? Quadro is a new robust mid-level programming language created by three computer scientists; Dr Darren Davies, MA Jamie Cameron, MA Simon Garner. ... A computer workstation, often colloquially referred to as workstation, is a high-end general-purpose microcomputer designed to be used by one person at a time and which offers higher performance than normally found in a personal computer, especially with respect to graphics, processing power and the ability to carry...

Company history

The company's name, Nvidia, combines an initial n — a letter often used for mathematical variables — and the root of video — which comes from Latin videre, "to see" — implying "the best visual experience".^{[citation needed]} The company-name appears entirely in upper-case ("NVIDIA") in company technical documentation, although marketing materials and other collateral show less brand-consistency. For other uses, see Latin (disambiguation). ...

The name Nvidia suggests "envy" (Spanish envidia or in Latin, Italian, or Romanian invidia); and the GeForce 8 series uses the slogan "Green with envy". In Roman mythology, Invidia was the goddess of jealousy. ... 8 Series, or G80, will be the eighth generation of NVIDIAs GeForce graphics cards. ...

Jen-Hsun Huang (the present CEO), Curtis Priem, and Chris Malachowsky co-founded the company in 1993. Jen-Hsun Huang Jen-Hsun Huang (黃仁勳; pinyin: Huáng Rénxūn) (born February 17, 1963) co-founded NVIDIA Corporation in 1993 and is currently the CEO and President. ... 2008 (MMVIII) will be a leap year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Curtis Priem helped cofound nVidia and was its Chief Technical Officer from 1993 to 2003. ... Chris Malachowsky Chris Malachowsky co-founded NVIDIA in April 1993. ...

In 2000 Nvidia acquired the intellectual assets of its one-time rival 3dfx, one of the biggest graphics companies of the mid to late 1990s. 3dfx Interactive was a company which specialized in the manufacturing of cutting-edge 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. ...

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^[1] and on January 5, 2007, it announced that it had completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc.^[2] is the 348th day of the year (349th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Diagram of a motherboard chipset A chipset is a group of integrated circuits, or chips, that are designed to work together, and are usually marketed as a single product. ... ATI redirects here. ... Hybrid Graphics Ltd [1] develops graphics software technology for consumer devices. ... is the 5th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... PortalPlayer (NASDAQ: PLAY) is a fabless semiconductor company that designs, develops and markets system-on-chip semiconductors, firmware and software for personal media players. ...

In December 2006 Nvidia, along with its main rival in the graphics industry AMD (which acquired ATI), received subpoenas from the Justice Department regarding possible antitrust violations in the graphics-card industry.^[3] The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C. “Justice Department” redirects here. ... The Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C. is home to the United States antitrust enforcers United States antitrust law is the body of laws which prohibit anti-competitive behavior (monopoly) and unfair business practices. ...

Forbes magazine named Nvidia its Company of the Year for 2007, citing the accomplishments it made during the said period as well as during the previous 5 years.^[4] This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

In February 2008 Nvidia acquired Ageia Technologies for an undisclosed sum. "The purchase reflects both companies['] shared goal of creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia. "By combining the teams that created the world's most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world."^{[citation needed]} The press release makes no mention of the acquisition-cost nor of specific products. Ageia, founded in 2002, is a fabless semiconductor company. ...

The same month, Nvidia announced NVISION, a visual computing related event, starting the August 25 in San Jose. The event will also feature a Guinness World Records attempt for the world's largest LAN party, and the finals for the Electronic Sports World Cup. ^[5] is the 237th day of the year (238th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... San José – or its anglicised form San Jose – is the Spanish for Saint Joseph. ... Guinness World Records 2008 edition. ... A large (approximately 300 people) LAN party in a sports hall in northern Germany A LAN party is a temporary, sometimes spontaneous, gathering of people together with their computers, which they network together primarily for the purpose of playing multiplayer computer games. ... The Electronic Sports World Cup is an international professional gaming championship. ...

Market history

Before DirectX

Graphic processor on Nvidia GeForce 6600GT

Nvidia Riva 128 video card

Nvidia released its first graphics card, the NV1, in 1995. Its design used quadratic surfaces, with an integrated playback-only sound-card and ports for Sega Saturn gamepads. Because the Saturn also used forward-rendered quadratics, programmers ported several Saturn games to play on a PC with NV1, such as Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter Remix. However, the NV1 struggled in a market-place full of several competing proprietary standards. Image File history File links Download high resolution version (978x938, 253 KB) File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (978x938, 253 KB) File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Size of this preview: 800 × 591 pixelsFull resolution (978 × 722 pixel, file size: 178 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) STB Velocity 128 (NVIDIA RIVA 128) AGP card. ... Image File history File links Size of this preview: 800 × 591 pixelsFull resolution (978 × 722 pixel, file size: 178 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) STB Velocity 128 (NVIDIA RIVA 128) AGP card. ... The NV1, also known as the SGS Thompson STG-2000, was a multimedia PCI card released in 1995 and sold to retail as the Diamond Edge 3D. It featured a complete 2D/3D graphics core based upon quadratic texture mapping, VRAM or FPM DRAM memory, an integrated 32-channel 350... In mathematics, a quadric, or quadric surface, is any D-dimensional hypersurface defined as the locus of zeros of a quadratic polynomial. ... The Sega Saturn ) is a 32-bit video game console, first released on November 22, 1994 in Japan, May 11, 1995 in North America and July 8, 1995 in Europe. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Panzer Dragoon is a series of video games by SEGA, created first by its internal Team Andromeda and later, the Smilebit development team. ... Virtua Fighter is a 1993 fighting game developed by the Sega studio AM2, headed by Yu Suzuki. ...

Market interest in the product ended when Microsoft announced the DirectX specifications, based upon polygons. Subsequently NV1 development continued internally as the NV2 project, funded by several millions of dollars of investment from Sega. Sega hoped that an integrated sound-and-graphics chip would cut the manufacturing cost of their next console. However, Sega eventually realized the flaws in implementing quadratic surfaces, and the NV2 was never fully developed.^{[citation needed]} Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. ... NV2 was to be NVIDIAs second graphics processor designed for consumer PC 3D accelerator add-in boards. ... This article is about the video game company. ...

A fresh start

Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang realized at this point that after two failed products, something had to change for the company to survive. He hired David Kirk, Ph.D. as Chief Scientist from software-developer Crystal Dynamics, a company renowned for the visual quality of its titles. David Kirk turned Nvidia around by combining the company's experience in 3D hardware with an intimate understanding of practical implementations of rendering. Crystal Dynamics is an American video game developer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. ... This article is about process of creating 3D computer graphics. ... Rendering has several different usages: Rendering (computer graphics) is the process of producing the pixels of an image from a higher-level description of its components. ...

As part of the corporate transformation, Nvidia abandoned proprietary interfaces, sought to fully support DirectX, and dropped multimedia-functionality in order to reduce manufacturing-costs. Nvidia also adopted the goal of an internal 6-month product-cycle. The future failure of any one product would not threaten the survival of the company, since a next-generation replacement part would always come available.

However, since the Sega NV2 contract remained secret, and since Nvidia had laid off employees, it appeared to many industry-observers that Nvidia had ceased active research-and-development. So when Nvidia first announced the RIVA 128 in 1997, the specifications were hard to believe: performance superior to market leader 3dfx Voodoo Graphics, and a full hardware triangle setup engine. The RIVA 128 shipped in volume, and the combination of its low cost and high performance made it a popular choice for OEMs. Layoff is the termination of employment of an employee or (more commonly) a group of employees for business reasons, such as the decision that certain positions are no longer necessary. ... Released in late 1997 by NVIDIA, the RIVA 128, or NV3, was one of the first generation of integrated consumer 3D chips. ... 3dfx Interactive was a company which specialized in the manufacturing of cutting-edge 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. ...

Ascendency: RIVA TNT

Having finally developed and shipped in volume the market-leading integrated graphics chipset, Nvidia set the internal goal of doubling the number of pixel pipelines in its chip, in order to realize a substantial performance-gain. The TwiN Texel (RIVA TNT) engine Nvidia subsequently developed, allowed either for two textures to be applied to a single pixel, or for two pixels to be processed per clock cycle. The former case allowing for improved visual quality, the latter doubling maximum fill rate. A pixel pipeline is a video card part that transfers pixel information. ... The RIVA TNT (For TwiN Texel) was a 3D graphics chipset manufactured by NVIDIA. It was released in late 1998 and cemented NVIDIAs reputation as the chief rival of then industry leader 3dfx. ... In electronics and especially synchronous digital circuits, a clock signal is a signal used to coordinate the actions of two or more circuits. ... The fillrate is the number of pixels a video card can generate in a period of time. ...

New features included a 24-bit Z-buffer with 8-bit stencil support, anisotropic filtering, and per-pixel MIP mapping. In certain respects (such as transistor-count) the TNT had begun to rival Intel's Pentium processors for complexity. However, while the TNT offered an astonishing range of quality integrated features, it failed to displace the market leader, 3dfx's Voodoo 2, because the actual clock-speed ended up at only 90 MHz, about 35% less than expected. Z-buffering is a term in computer graphics which refers to management of image depth coordinates in 3-d graphics, mainly used in hardware, more seldom in software. ... Stencil buffer is an extra buffer in addition to the color buffer and depth buffer found in OpenGL and Direct3D. The buffer is per pixel, and works on integer values. ... An illustration of texture filtering methods showing trilinear MIP map texture on the left and enhanced with anisotropic texture filtering on the right. ... In 3D computer graphics texture mapping, MIP maps (also mipmaps) are pre-calculated, optimized collections of bitmap images that accompany a main texture, intended to increase rendering speed and reduce artifacts. ... Intel redirects here. ... 3dfx Interactive was a company which specialized in the manufacturing of cutting-edge 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. ... The Voodoo2 chip The Voodoo 2 was a GPU made by 3dfx. ...

Nvidia responded with a refresh part: a die-shrink for the TNT architecture from 350 nm to 250 nm. A stock TNT now ran at 125 MHz, an Ultra at 150 MHz. Though the Voodoo 3 beat Nvidia to the market, 3dfx's offering proved disappointing: it was not much faster and lacked features that were becoming standard, such as 32-bit color and textures of resolution greater than 256 x 256 pixels. 3dfx Voodoo3 box art Voodoo3 was a series of computer gaming video cards manufactured and designed by 3dfx Interactive. ... 32-bit is a term applied to processors, and computer architectures which manipulate the address and data in 32-bit chunks. ...

The RIVA TNT2 marked a major turning-point for Nvidia. They had finally delivered a product competitive with the fastest on the market, with a superior feature-set, strong 2D functionality, all integrated onto a single die with strong yields, that ramped to impressive clock-speeds. Nvidia's six month cycle refresh took the competition by surprise, giving it the initiative in rolling out new products. The RIVA TNT2 was a 3D graphics chip manufactured by NVIDIA starting in early 1999. ...

Market leadership: GeForce

The autumn of 1999 saw the release of the GeForce 256 (NV10), most notably bringing on-board transformation and lighting. It ran at 120 MHz; it implemented advanced video-acceleration, motion-compensation and hardware sub-picture alpha-blending; and had four pixel pipelines. The GeForce outperformed existing products — such as the ATI Rage 128, 3dfx Voodoo 3, Matrox G400 MAX, and RIVA TNT2 — by a wide margin The GeForce 256 (codenamed NV10), often known simply as the GeForce, was the first of NVIDIAs GeForce product-line. ...

Due to the success of its products, Nvidia won the contract to develop the graphics hardware for Microsoft’s Xbox game-console, which earned Nvidia a large $200 million advance. However, the project drew the time of many of Nvidia's best engineers. In the short term, this was of no importance, and the GeForce 2 GTS shipped in the summer of 2000. The GeForce 3 (codenamed NV20) was NVIDIAs third-generation GeForce chip. ... The Xbox is a sixth generation era video game console produced by Microsoft Corporation. ... The GeForce 2 was the second in the line of GeForce graphics cards by NVIDIA Corporation. ...

The GTS benefited from the fact that Nvidia had by this time acquired extensive manufacturing experience with their highly integrated cores, and as a result they succeeded in optimizing the core for clock-speeds. The volumes of chips Nvidia was producing also enabled them to bin split parts, picking out the highest quality cores for their premium range. As a result, the GTS shipped at 200 MHz. The pixel fill rate of the GeForce256 nearly doubled, and texel fill rate nearly quadrupled because multi-texturing was added to each pixel pipeline. New features included S3TC compression, FSAA, and improved MPEG-2 motion compensation. S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) (sometimes also called DXTn or DXTC) is a group of related image compression algorithms originally developed by S3 Graphics, Ltd. ... Modern graphics_cards usually support some method of FSAA or Full Scene Anti-Aliasing to help avoid aliasing and jaggies on full screen images. ... MPEG-2 is a standard for the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information [1]. It is widely used around the world to specify the format of the digital television signals that are broadcast by terrestrial (over-the-air), cable, and direct broadcast satellite TV systems. ...

Shortly afterwards Nvidia launched the GeForce 2 MX, intended for the budget and OEM market. It had two pixel-pipelines fewer, and ran at 165 MHz and later, 250 MHz. Offering strong performance at a midrange price, the GeForce 2MX is one of the most successful graphics chipset of all time. A mobile derivative called the GeForce2 Go was also shipped at the end of 2000. The GeForce 2 was the second in the line of GeForce graphics cards by NVIDIA Corporation. ...

Nvidia's success proved too much for 3dfx to recover its past market-share. The long-delayed Voodoo 5, the successor to the Voodoo 3, did not compare favorably with the GeForce 2 in either price or performance, and failed to generate the sales needed to keep the company afloat. With 3dfx on the verge of bankruptcy near the end of 2000, Nvidia purchased most of their intellectual property, which was in dispute at the time,^[6] but also acquired anti-aliasing expertise, and about 100 engineers (but not the company itself which filed for bankruptcy in 2002). 3dfx Interactive was a company which specialized in the manufacturing of cutting-edge 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. ... Voodoo 5 box art The Voodoo 5 was the last and most powerful graphics card line that 3dfx Interactive released. ... In digital signal processing, anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution. ...

Nvidia developed the GeForce 3 which pioneered DirectX 8 vertex and pixel-shaders, and then refined it with the GeForce 4 Ti line. The GeForce 2 was succeeded by the GeForce 4 MX. The GeForce 4 Ti, MX, and Go were all announced in January 2002, one of the largest releases in Nvidia history. Cleverly, the chips in the Ti and Go series differed only by chip and memory clock-speeds. (The MX series lacked the pixel and vertex shader functionalities; it derived from GeForce 2 level hardware.) The GeForce 3 (codenamed NV20) was NVIDIAs third-generation GeForce chip. ... A GeForce 4 (codenames below) is a fourth-generation graphics processing unit (GPU) manufactured by NVIDIA which forms the basis of many computer graphics cards. ... A GeForce 4 (codenames below) is a fourth-generation graphics processing unit (GPU) manufactured by NVIDIA which forms the basis of many computer graphics cards. ...

Shortcomings of the FX series

At this point Nvidia’s market position looked unassailable, and industry observers began to refer to Nvidia as the Intel of the graphics-industry. However, their major remaining rival ATI Technologies did stay competitive due to their Radeon which was mostly on par with the GeForce 2 GTS. Though their answer to the GeForce 3, the Radeon 8500, was later and initially plagued by driver issues, the 8500 proved a superior competitor due to its lower price and greater potential. Nvidia countered ATI's offering with the GeForce 4 Ti line, though the Ti 4200's delayed rollout enabled the 8500 to carve out a niche. ATI opted to work on their next generation Radeon 9700 rather than a direct competitor to the GeForce 4 Ti. Intel redirects here. ... ATI redirects here. ... The Radeon 8500 (a. ... The Radeon R300 (introduced August 2002) is the third generation of Radeon graphics chips from ATI Technologies. ... A GeForce 4 (codenames below) is a fourth-generation graphics processing unit (GPU) manufactured by NVIDIA which forms the basis of many computer graphics cards. ... The Radeon R300 (introduced August 2002) is the third generation of Radeon graphics chips from ATI Technologies. ...

During the development of the next-generation GeForce FX chips, many of Nvidia’s best engineers focused on the Xbox contract, developing a motherboard solution, including the API used as part of the SoundStorm platform. Nvidia also had a contractual obligation to develop newer and more hack-resistant NV2A chips, and this requirement further shortchanged the FX project. The Xbox contract did not allow for falling manufacturing costs as processor technology improved, and Microsoft sought to re-negotiate the terms of the contract, withholding the DirectX 9 specifications as leverage. As a result, Nvidia and Microsoft relations, which had previously been very good, deteriorated. Both parties later settled the dispute through arbitration and the terms were not released to the public. However, the dispute was what prompted Nvidia to pass over developing a graphics solution for the succeeding Xbox 360, with ATI taking on that contract, while Nvidia decided to work on the Sony PlayStation 3 instead. NVIDIA GeForce FX logo The famous Dawn demo was released by NVIDIA to showcase pixel and vertex shaders effects of the GeForce FX Series The GeForce FX (codenamed NV30) is a graphics card in the GeForce line, from the manufacturer NVIDIA. // Overview NVIDIAs GeForce FX series is the fifth... The Xbox is a sixth generation era video game console produced by Microsoft Corporation. ... SoundStorm was an advanced integrated 5. ... The GeForce 3 (codenamed NV20) was NVIDIAs third-generation GeForce chip. ... It has been suggested that Xbox 360 Elite be merged into this article or section. ... The PlayStation 3 , trademarked PLAYSTATION®3,[3] commonly abbreviated PS3) is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment; successor to the PlayStation 2. ...

Due to the Xbox dispute, Nvidia was not consulted during the drawing up of the DirectX 9 specification, while ATI designed the Radeon 9700 to fit the DirectX specifications. Rendering color support was limited to 12 bits floating point, and shader performance had been emphasized throughout development, since this was to be the main focus of DirectX 9. The shader compiler was also built using the Radeon 9700 as the base card. // Development Radeon 9700 board The first DirectX 9 card released to the market was the ATI Technologies Radeon 9700PRO (a. ...

In contrast, Nvidia’s cards offered 16- and 32-bit floating point modes, offering either lower visual quality (as compared to the competition), or slow performance. The 32-bit support made them much more expensive to manufacture, requiring a higher transistor count. Shader performance often remained at half or less of the speed provided by ATI's competing products. Having made its reputation by providing easy to manufacture DirectX compatible parts, Nvidia had misjudged Microsoft’s next standard and paid a heavy price: As more and more games started to rely on DirectX 9 features, the poor shader performance of the GeForce FX series became ever more obvious. With the exception of the FX 5700 series (a late revision), the FX series lacked performance compared to equivalent ATI cards.

Nvidia started to become ever more desperate to hide the shortcomings of the GeForce FX range. It released a notable "FX only" demo called Dawn, but the wrapper was hacked to enable it to run on a 9700, where it ran faster despite a perceived translation overhead. Nvidia also began to include "optimizations" in their drivers to increase performance. While some users contended that increased real world gaming performance were valid, hardware review sites started to run articles showing how Nvidia’s driver auto-detected benchmarks, and produced artificially inflated scores that did not relate to real world performance. Often it was tips from ATI’s driver development team that lay behind these articles. As Nvidia’s drivers became ever more full of hacks and "optimizations," the legendary stability and compatibility also began to suffer. While Nvidia did partially close the gap with new instruction reordering capabilities introduced in later drivers, shader performance remained weak and over-sensitive to hardware-specific code compilation. Nvidia worked with Microsoft to release an updated DirectX compiler, that generated GeForce FX specific optimized code. Dawns realistic face Dawn is both the name of NVIDIAs technology demo and its main character. ...

Furthermore, GeForce FX devices also ran hot, because they drew as much as double the amount of power as equivalent parts from ATI. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra became notorious for the fan noise, and acquired the nicknames "dustbuster" and "leafblower" - Nvidia jokingly acknowledged these accusations with a video, where the marketing team compares the cards to a Harley-Davidson. ^[7] While it was quietly withdrawn and replaced with the quieter 5900, the FX chips still needed large and expensive fans, placing Nvidia's partners at a manufacturing cost disadvantage compared to ATI. As a result of Microsoft's actions, and the resultant FX series' weaknesses, Nvidia quite unexpectedly lost its market leadership position to ATI. Logo on a 2003 Harley Davidson The Harley-Davidson Motor Company (NYSE: HDI) is a manufacturer of motorcycles based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. ...

GeForce 6 series and later

The old Nvidia logo, in use until the release of the GeForce 7 series.

With the GeForce 6 series, Nvidia had clearly moved beyond the DX9 performance problems that plagued the previous generation. The GeForce 6 series not only performed competitively where Direct 3D shaders were concerned, but also supported DirectX Shader Model 3.0, while ATI's competing X800 series chips only supported the previous 2.0 specification. This proved an insignificant advantage, mainly because games of that period did not employ extensions for Shader Model 3.0. However, it demonstrated Nvidia's desire to design and follow through with the newest features and deliver them in a specific timeframe. What became more apparent during this time was that the products of the two firms, ATI and Nvidia, offered equivalent performance. The two firms traded blows in specific titles and specific criteria — resolution, image quality, anisotropic filtering/anti-aliasing — but differences were becoming more abstract, and the reigning concern became price-to-performance. The mid-range offerings of the two firms demonstrated the consumers' appetite for affordable, high-performance graphics cards, and it is now this price segment in which much of the firms' profitability is determined. The GeForce 7 series were released in a very interesting period: the game Doom 3 was just released where ATI's Radeon 9700 struggled at the OpenGL performance. In 2004, the GeForce 6800 performed excellently, while the GeForce 6600GT remained as important to Nvidia as the GeForce2 MX a few years previously. The GeForce 6600GT enabled users of the card to play Doom 3 at very high resolutions and graphical settings, which was thought to be highly unlikely considering its selling price. The GeForce 6 series also introduced SLI (which is similar to what 3dfx was using on the Voodoo 2). A combination of SLI and the performance gain as a result returned Nvidia to market leadership. The GeForce 7 Series is the seventh generation of NVIDIAs GeForce graphics cards. ... The GeForce 6 Series (codenamed NV40) is NVIDIAs sixth generation of GeForce graphics chipsets. ... For other uses, see SLI. NVIDIA SLI Logo Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is a brand name for a multi-GPU solution developed by NVIDIA for linking two (or more) video cards together to produce a single output. ...

The GeForce 7 series represented a heavily beefed-up extension of the reliable 6-series. The industry's introduction of the PCI Express bus standard allowed Nvidia to release "SLI", a solution that employs two similar cards to share the workload in rendering. While these solutions do not equate to double the performance, and require more electricity (two cards vis-à-vis one), they can make a huge difference as higher resolutions and settings are enabled and, more importantly, offer more upgrade flexibility. ATI responded with the X1000 series, and their own dual-rendering solution called "Crossfire". Sony chose Nvidia to develop the "RSX" chip used in the PlayStation 3 — a modified version of the 7800 GPU. The GeForce 7 Series is the seventh generation of NVIDIAs GeForce graphics cards. ... PCI Express (formerly known as 3GIO for 3rd Generation I/O, not to be mistaken with PCI-X) is an implementation of the PCI computer bus that uses existing PCI programming concepts and communications standards, but bases it on a much faster serial communications system. ...

Nvidia released the 8800-series chip at the end of 2006, making them the first to support Microsoft's next-generation DirectX 10 specification. DirectX is a collection of APIs for easily handling tasks related to game programming on the Microsoft Windows operating system. ...

Nvidia has also released the 9600-series chip, which supports Microsoft's DirectX 10 specitication in February 2008, as a response to ATI's release of the highly competitive Radeon HD3800 series.

Current market-share

According to a survey^[8] conducted by Jon Peddie Research, a market-watch firm, in the 3rd quarter of 2007, Nvidia occupied the top slot in the desktop graphic-devices market with a market share of 37.9%. However, in the mobile space, it remained third with 22.8% of the market. Overall Nvidia has maintained its position as the second-largest supplier of PC graphic shipments, which includes both integrated and discrete GPUs, with 33.9% market share, their highest in many years, which puts them just behind Intel (38%).

According to the Steam hardware survey [1] conducted by Valve, Nvidia has 62.06% (as of March 11, 2008) of PC videocard market share. ATI currently has 30.81% of the PC videocard market share. But this could be attributed to Valve releasing trial versions of The Orange Box to Nvidia graphics card users, which link to the test. Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. ... Orange Box redirects here. ...

Products

Nvidia's product-portfolio includes graphics-processors, wireless-communications processors, PC platform (motherboard core-logic) chipsets, and digital-media-player software. The Mac/PC user community arguably knows Nvidia best for its "GeForce" product-line, which not only offers a complete line of "discrete" graphics chips found in AIB (add-in-board) video cards, but also provides a core-technology in both the Microsoft Xbox game-console and nForce motherboards. Diagram of a motherboard chipset A chipset is a group of integrated circuits, or chips, that are designed to work together, and are usually marketed as a single product. ... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... The Xbox is a sixth generation era video game console produced by Microsoft Corporation. ...

In many respects, Nvidia resembles its competitor ATI, because both companies began with a focus in the PC market, but later expanded their businesses into chips for non-PC applications. Nvidia does not sell graphics boards into the retail market, instead focusing on the development of GPU chips. The manufacturing of Nvidia chips, as a fabless semiconductor company occurs in the Taiwanese TSMC. As part of their operations, both ATI and Nvidia do create "reference designs" (board schematics) and provide manufacturing samples to their board partners. BFG, EVGA, PNY, and XFX are some prominent Nvidia card manufacturers. ASUS and MSI are examples of manufacturers of both ATI and Nvidia cards. ATI may stand for: ATI Technologies Inc. ... “GPU” redirects here. ... A fabless semiconductor company specializes in the design and sale of hardware devices implemented on semiconductor chips. ... Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Limited (Traditional Chinese: 台灣積體電路製造股份有限公司, abbrev. ... BFG Technologies is a privately held U.S.-based supplier of premium 3D video cards based on NVIDIA graphics technology. ... The correct title of this article is eVGA. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical restrictions. ... PNY Technologies logo PNY is a computer hardware company established in 1985 which makes: memory upgrades, flash drives/memory cards for digital cameras, USB flash drives, NVIDIA Quadro graphics boards, Consumer Graphics Cards, and more. ... The XFX logo & slogan XFX is a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-headquartered Pine Technology Holdings Limited Group that specializes in the manufacture of graphics cards based on designs by chipset manufacturer NVIDIA. Like BFG and eVGA, XFX sell cards which come overclocked to speeds higher than the standard cards... For other uses, see ASUS (disambiguation). ... MSI may mean any of: Math Science Institute, a major in Brooklyn Technical High School Media Sports Investment, the international fund of investors that runs Sport Club Corinthians Paulista Medium Scale Integration, a kind of electronic chips Message Signaled Interrupts, a PCI 2. ...

December 2004 saw the announcement that Nvidia would assist Sony with the design of the graphics processor (RSX) in the Sony PlayStation 3 game-console. As of March 2006, it is known that Nvidia will deliver RSX to Sony as an IP-core, and that Sony alone would be responsible for manufacturing the RSX. Under the agreement, Nvidia will provide ongoing support to port the RSX to Sony's fabs of choice (Sony and Toshiba), as well as die-shrinks to 65 nm. This is a departure from Nvidia's business arrangement with Microsoft, in which Nvidia managed production and delivery of the Xbox GPU through Nvidia's usual third-party foundry contracts. (Meanwhile, Microsoft has chosen to license a design by ATI and make their own manufacturing arrangements for Xbox 360's graphics hardware, as has Nintendo for their Wii console to succeed the ATI-based GameCube.) Sony Corporation ) is a Japanese multinational corporation and one of the worlds largest media conglomerates with revenue of $66. ... The RSX Reality Synthesizer graphics processing unit is a graphics chip design co-developed by NVIDIA and Sony for the PlayStation 3 computer console. ... The PlayStation 3 , trademarked PLAYSTATION®3,[3] commonly abbreviated PS3) is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment; successor to the PlayStation 2. ... It has been suggested that Xbox 360 Elite be merged into this article or section. ... Nintendo Company, Limited (任天堂 or ニンテンドー Nintendō; NASDAQ: NTDOY, TYO: 7974 usually referred to as simply Nintendo, or Big N ) is a multinational corporation founded on September 23, 1889[1] in Kyoto, Japan by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce handmade hanafuda cards. ... The Wii (pronounced as the pronoun we, IPA: ) is the fifth home video game console released by Nintendo. ... The Nintendo GameCube (Japanese: ゲームキューブ; originally code-named Dolphin during development; abbreviated as GCN) is Nintendos fourth home video game console, belonging to the 128-bit era; the same generation as Segas Dreamcast, Sonys PlayStation 2, and Microsofts Xbox. ...

On February 4, 2008, NVIDIA announced their plans to acquire physics software producer AGEIA, whose PhysX physics engine program can be found in hundreds of games shipping or in development for PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, Wii, and gaming PCs.^[9] This transaction was finished on February 13, 2008 ^[10] and efforts to integrate PhysX into the GeForce 8800's CUDA system began. ^{[11] [12]} is the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2008 (MMVIII) is the current year, a leap year that started on Tuesday of the Anno Domini (or common era), in accordance to the Gregorian calendar. ... PS2 redirects here. ... It has been suggested that Xbox 360 Elite be merged into this article or section. ... The Wii (pronounced as the pronoun we, IPA: ) is the fifth home video game console released by Nintendo. ... is the 44th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2008 (MMVIII) is the current year, a leap year that started on Tuesday of the Anno Domini (or common era), in accordance to the Gregorian calendar. ... PhysX can refer either to a proprietary realtime physics engine middleware SDK developed by AGEIA (formerly known as the NovodeX SDK) or their PPU expansion card designed to accelerate that SDK. Middleware physics engines allow game developers to avoid writing their own code to handle the complex physics interactions possible... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Graphics chipsets

• NV1 – Nvidia's first product, based on quadratic surfaces
• RIVA 128 and RIVA 128ZX – DirectX 5 support, OpenGL 1 support, Nvidia's first DirectX-compliant hardware
• RIVA TNT, RIVA TNT2 – DirectX 6 support, OpenGL 1 support; the series that made Nvidia a market-leader
• Nvidia GeForce - Desktop-graphics acceleration-solutions
• Nvidia Quadro – High-quality workstation solutions
• Nvidia Tesla - Dedicated GPGPU processing for High Performance Computing systems
• Nvidia GoForce – Media processors for PDAs, Smartphones, and mobile phones featuring nPower technology
• GPU for game consoles
  • Xbox GeForce 3 - class GPU (on an Intel Pentium III/Celeron platform)
  • PlayStation 3 - RSX 'Reality Synthesizer'

The NV1, also known as the SGS Thompson STG-2000, was a multimedia PCI card released in 1995 and sold to retail as the Diamond Edge 3D. It featured a complete 2D/3D graphics core based upon quadratic texture mapping, VRAM or FPM DRAM memory, an integrated 32-channel 350... Released in late 1997 by NVIDIA, the RIVA 128, or NV3, was one of the first generation of integrated consumer 3D chips. ... Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. ... OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. ... The RIVA TNT (For TwiN Texel) was a 3D graphics chipset manufactured by NVIDIA. It was released in late 1998 and cemented NVIDIAs reputation as the chief rival of then industry leader 3dfx. ... The RIVA TNT2 was a 3D graphics chip manufactured by NVIDIA starting in early 1999. ... GeForce is a brand of PC graphics chipsets designed by NVIDIA. The first GeForce products were designed and marketed for the high-margin computer gamer community, but later the products releases expanded the product line to cover all tiers of the graphics market, from low-end to high-end. ... For a definition of the word quadro, see the Wiktionary entry quadro. ... The Tesla GPU is NVIDIAs third brand of GPUs. ... General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, also referred to as GPGP and to a lesser extent GP²) is a recent trend focused on using GPUs to perform computations rather than the CPU. The addition of programmable stages and higher precision arithmetic to the rendering pipelines allowed software developers... The field of high performance computing (HPC) comprises computing applications on (parallel) supercomputers and computer clusters. ... The NVIDIA GoForce line of chipsets used mainly in handheld devices such as PDA and Mobile phones. ... A smartphone is generally considered any handheld device that integrates personal information management and mobile phone capabilities in the same device. ... The Xbox is a sixth generation era video game console produced by Microsoft Corporation. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... Pentium III logo The Pentium III is an x86 (more precisely, an i686) architecture microprocessor by Intel, introduced on February 26, 1999. ... The Celeron brand refers to a range of Intels x86 CPUs for budget/value personal computers. ... The PlayStation 3 , trademarked PLAYSTATION®3,[3] commonly abbreviated PS3) is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment; successor to the PlayStation 2. ... The RSX Reality Synthesizer graphics processing unit is a graphics chip design co-developed by NVIDIA and Sony for the PlayStation 3 computer console. ...

Personal-computer platforms and chipsets

• Nvidia nForce
  • nForce IGP (AMD Athlon/Duron K7 line)
  • nForce2 (AMD Athlon/Duron K7 line, SPP (system platform processor) or IGP (Integrated Graphics Platform) and MCP (Media and Communications Processor), also features SoundStorm)
  • nForce3 (AMD Athlon 64/Athlon 64 FX/Opteron, MCP only)
  • nForce4 (AMD Athlon 64/Athlon 64 X2/Athlon 64 FX/Opteron, MCP only;Intel Pentium 4/Pentium D, SSP + MCP)
  • nForce 500 (AMD Athlon 64 FX/Athlon 64 X2/Athlon 64/Sempron or Intel Core 2 Extreme/Core 2 Duo/Pentium 4/Celeron D/Pentium D)
  • nForce 600 (AMD Quad FX or Intel Core 2 Quad/Core 2 Extreme/Core 2 Duo/Pentium 4/Celeron D/Pentium D)
  • nForce 700 (Intel Core 2 and AMD Phenom)

The nForce is a computer motherboard chipset created by NVIDIA for AMD Athlon and Duron microprocessors. ... Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ... Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of different x86 processors designed and manufactured by AMD. The original Athlon, or Athlon Classic, was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and, in a first, retained the initial performance lead it had over Intels competing processors for a significant... The AMD Duron was an x86-compatible computer processor manufactured by AMD. It was released on June 19, 2000 as a low-cost alternative to AMDs own Athlon processor and the Pentium III and Celeron processor lines from rival Intel. ... The nForce2 Chipset was released by NVIDIA in July of 2002 as a refresh to the original nForce product offering. ... A Media Communications Processor (MCP) is a type of processor designed specifically for the creation and distribution of digital media. ... SoundStorm was an advanced integrated 5. ... nVidia nForce3 logo The correct title of this article is nForce3. ... The Athlon 64 is an eighth-generation, AMD64 architecture microprocessor produced by AMD, released on September 23, 2003. ... The Opteron is AMDs x86 server processor line, and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). ... The nForce4 is a computer chipset released by NVIDIA in October, 2004. ... The Athlon 64 is an eighth-generation, AMD64 architecture microprocessor produced by AMD, released on September 23, 2003. ... The Opteron is AMDs x86 server processor line, and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64). ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... The Pentium 4[1] brand refers to Intels single-core mainstream desktop and laptop CPUs introduced on November 20, 2000[2] (August 8, 2008 is the date of last shipments of Pentium 4s[3]). They had the 7th-generation architecture - called NetBurst - which was the companys first all... Pentium D logo as of 2006. ... The nForce 500 computer chipset series, successor to the nForce4, was revealed by NVIDIA on 2006-03-07. ... This does not cite any references or sources. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... Core 2 Duo brand logo This article is about Intel processors branded as Intel Core 2. ... The Pentium 4[1] brand refers to Intels single-core mainstream desktop and laptop CPUs introduced on November 20, 2000[2] (August 8, 2008 is the date of last shipments of Pentium 4s[3]). They had the 7th-generation architecture - called NetBurst - which was the companys first all... 633MHz Celeron A Celeron is any of a large number of different budget x86 microprocessors produced by Intel and marketed as a second line to complement their more expensive but higher-performance Pentium CPUs. ... Pentium D logo as of 2006. ... The nForce 600 chipset was released in the first half of November 2006, coinciding with the GeForce 8 series launch on November 8, 2006. ... The AMD Quad FX platform is an AMD platform targeted at enthusiasts. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... Core 2 Duo brand logo This article is about Intel processors branded as Intel Core 2. ... The Pentium 4[1] brand refers to Intels single-core mainstream desktop and laptop CPUs introduced on November 20, 2000[2] (August 8, 2008 is the date of last shipments of Pentium 4s[3]). They had the 7th-generation architecture - called NetBurst - which was the companys first all... 633MHz Celeron A Celeron is any of a large number of different budget x86 microprocessors produced by Intel and marketed as a second line to complement their more expensive but higher-performance Pentium CPUs. ... Pentium D logo as of 2006. ... The nForce 700 is a chipset series designed by NVIDIA, to be released before the end of 2007, shortly after the launch of GeForce 8800 GT (codenamed G92) video card. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... Core 2 Duo brand logo This article is about Intel processors branded as Intel Core 2. ... Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ... Phenom (pronounced as IPA: as in the word phenomenon, IPA:) is the AMD desktop processor line based on the K10 (not K10h) microarchitecture [1], or Family 10h Processors (K8 was Family 0Fh), as AMD calls them. ...

Documentation and drivers

Main article: Graphics hardware and FOSS

Nvidia does not publish the documentation for its hardware, meaning that programmers cannot write appropriate and effective open-source drivers for Nvidia's products. Instead, Nvidia provides its own binary GeForce graphics drivers for X.Org and a thin open-source library that interfaces with the Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris kernels and the proprietary graphics software. NVIDIA also supports an obfuscated open-source driver that only supports two-dimensional hardware acceleration and ships with the X.Org distribution. Nvidia's Linux support has promoted mutual adoption in the entertainment, scientific visualization, defense and simulation/training industries, traditionally dominated by SGI, Evans & Sutherland and other relatively costly vendors. Using graphics hardware with free and open source software (FOSS) can be difficult, because some of the leading manufacturers of graphics cards do not provide technical documentation sufficient for independent developers to create accelerated 3D device drivers for their products. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... A Hexdump of a JPEG image. ... The X.Org logo The X.Org Foundation is the consortium holding the stewardship for the development of the X Window System. ... The Linux kernel is a Unix-like operating system kernel. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4. ... Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. ... Proprietary software is software with restrictions on copying and modifying as enforced by the proprietor. ... The X.Org logo The X.Org Foundation is the consortium holding the stewardship for the development of the X Window System. ... Silicon Graphics, Inc. ... Evans & Sutherland is a computer firm involved in the computer graphics field. ...

Because of the proprietary nature of Nvidia's drivers, they continue to generate controversy within the free software communities. Many Linux and BSD users insist on using only open-source drivers, and regard Nvidia's insistence to provide nothing more than a binary-only driver as wholly inadequate, when competing manufacturers like ATI and Intel offer excellent support and documentation for open-source developers.^[13] Because of the closed nature of the drivers, NVIDIA video cards do not deliver adequate features on several platforms and architectures, such as FreeBSD on the x86-64 architecture and the other BSD operating systems on any architecture. Support for three dimensional graphics acceleration Linux on the PowerPC is also absent, as is support for Linux the hypervisor-restricted PlayStation 3 console. While some users accept the Nvidia-supported drivers, many users of open-source software would prefer a better OOTB experience^[14] if given the choice. Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. ... For other uses, see Community (disambiguation). ... ATI may stand for: ATI Technologies Inc. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is an American multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... AMD64 Logo AMD64 (also x86-64 or x64) is a 64-bit microprocessor architecture and corresponding instruction set designed by Advanced Micro Devices. ... BSD redirects here; for other uses see BSD (disambiguation). ... PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded and high-performance processors as well. ... “PS3” redirects here. ...

X.Org Foundation and Freedesktop.org started the Nouveau project, which aims to develop free software drivers for Nvidia graphics cards by reverse-engineering Nvidia's current proprietary drivers for Linux. The X.Org swoosh logo. ... freedesktop. ... A screenshot of renouveau in action (renouveau is the blue window in the top left corner) In computing, nouveau is an X.Org Foundation and Freedesktop. ... Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. ... A device driver, or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a computer hardware device. ... Reverse engineering (RE) is the process of taking something (a device, an electrical component, a software program, etc. ... Proprietary software is software with restrictions on copying and modifying as enforced by the proprietor. ... This article is about operating systems that use the Linux kernel. ...

Video-card manufacturers

Nvidia does not manufacture video-cards, only the GPU chips. They do specify the speed and configuration for both the chips and video memory, which the third-parties are expected to follow. The cards are assembled by OEMs under one of the following brand names: “GPU” redirects here. ... Original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, is a term that refers to containment-based re-branding, namely where one company uses a component of another company within its product, or sells the product of another company under its own brand. ...

• Albatron Technology
• AOpen
• ASUS
• BFG (also under its 3D Fuzion brand)
• Biostar
• Chaintech
• Club 3D
• Creative Labs
• ELSA Technology
• eVGA
• Foxconn
• Gainward
• GALAXY Technology
• Gigabyte
• Inno3D
• Leadtek
• Micro-Star International (MSI)
• OCZ
• Palit
• POV
• PNY
• Sparkle Computer
• TwinTech
• XFX
• Zogis
• Zotac

AOpen is a major electronics manufacturer that makes computers and parts for computers. ... For other uses, see ASUS (disambiguation). ... BFG Technologies is a privately held U.S.-based supplier of premium 3D video cards based on NVIDIA graphics technology. ... 3D Fuzion is a downmarket subsidiary of BFG Technologies. ... This article does not adequately cite its references. ... A Chaintech AV-710 sound card based on the VIA Envy chipset Chaintech Computer Co. ... Club 3D is a brand of video cards for PCs, featuring ATis and NVIDIAs graphic chipsets and technologies. ... Creative Technology Ltd. ... The correct title of this article is eVGA. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical restrictions. ... Foxconn (富士康) is the trade name of the Taiwanese firm Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. ... Gainward is a computer hardware company which produces graphic cards. ... Galaxy Technology Ltd. ... Gigabyte (or Giga-byte) Technology is a Taiwan-based manufacturer of computer hardware products best known for its motherboards. ... Inno3D is a division of InnoVision Multimedia Limited. ... Leadtek Research, Inc. ... Micro-Star International (MSI) is a Taiwanese computer and components manufacturer. ... OCZ Technology is a manufacturer of random access memory and Flash Memory based in Sunnyvale, California. ... Palit is a computer graphics card manufacturer and is based in Hong Kong, with factories in China and offices in Germany and Taiwan. ... Point of View, POV is a computer hardware company that produces gaming graphics cards and was established in the year 2000. ... PNY Technologies, Inc. ... The XFX logo & slogan XFX is a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-headquartered Pine Technology Holdings Limited Group that specializes in the manufacture of graphics cards based on designs by chipset manufacturer NVIDIA. Like BFG and eVGA, XFX sell cards which come overclocked to speeds higher than the standard cards...

See also

• ATI Technologies
• Comparison of ATI graphics processing units
• Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units
• Matrox
• Nvidia Demos

ATI redirects here. ... This page contains general information about ATIs GPUs and video cards based on official ATI specifications in table form. ... This table contains general information about NVIDIAs GPUs and videocards based on official NVIDIA specifications. ... Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd is a Canadian company based in Dorval, Quebec, which produces video card components and equipment for personal computers. ... In order to showcase the prowess of GeForce chipsets, NVIDIA creates technology demos that render in real-time on the chipsets in question (while videos are usually also made available). ...

References

Current logo of The Register. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 335th day of the year (336th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2008 (MMVIII) is the current year, a leap year that started on Tuesday of the Anno Domini (or common era), in accordance to the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 7th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 360th day of the year (361st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 302nd day of the year (303rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... 2008 (MMVIII) is the current year, a leap year that started on Tuesday of the Anno Domini (or common era), in accordance to the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 226th day of the year (227th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 263rd day of the year (264th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

• Nvidia.com – Corporate website
• nZone.com - Nvidia's gaming community site

Coordinates: 37°22′14.62″N, 121°57′49.46″W Map of Earth showing lines of latitude (horizontally) and longitude (vertically), Eckert VI projection; large version (pdf, 1. ...