GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation

Chapter 30. The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture

Emmett KilgariffNVIDIA Corporation

Randima FernandoNVIDIA Corporation

The previous chapter described how GPU architecture has changed as a result of computational and communications trends in microprocessing. This chapter describes the architecture of the GeForce 6 Series GPUs from NVIDIA, which owe their formidable computational power to their ability to take advantage of these trends. Most notably, we focus on the GeForce 6800 (NVIDIA’s flagship GPU at the time of writing, shown in Figure 30-1), which delivers hundreds of gigaflops of single-precision floating-point computation, as compared to approximately 12 gigaflops for current high-end CPUs. In this chapter—and throughout the book—references ...