GeForce 500 series explained

GeForce 500 series
Codename:	GF11x
Architecture:	Fermi
Model:	GeForce series
Model1:	GeForce GT series
Model2:	GeForce GTX series
Transistors:	292M 40 nm (GF119)
Transistors1:	585M 40 nm (GF108)
Transistors2:	1.170M 40 nm (GF116)
Transistors3:	1.950M 40 nm (GF114)
Transistors4:	3.000M 40 nm (GF110)
Entry:	GT 505 GT 510 GT 520 GT 530
Midrange:	GT 545 GTX 550 Ti GTX 560 GTX 560 Ti GTX 560-448 Ti
Highend:	GTX 570 GTX 580
Enthusiast:	GTX 590
Openglversion:	OpenGL 4.6
D3dversion:	Direct3D 11.0 (feature level 11_0)^[1] Shader Model 5.1
Openclversion:	OpenCL 1.1
Predecessor:	GeForce 400 series
Successor:	GeForce 600 series
Support Status:	Unsupported

The GeForce 500 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, as a refresh of the Fermi based GeForce 400 series. It was first released on November 9, 2010 with the GeForce GTX 580.

Its direct competitor was AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series; they were launched approximately a month apart.

Overview

The Nvidia Geforce 500 series graphics cards are significantly modified versions of the GeForce 400 series graphics cards, in terms of performance and power management. Like the Nvidia GeForce 400 series graphics cards, the Nvidia Geforce 500 series supports DirectX 11.0,OpenGL 4.6, and OpenCL 1.1.

The refreshed Fermi chip includes 512 stream processors, grouped in 16 stream multiprocessors clusters (each with 32 CUDA cores), and is manufactured by TSMC in a 40 nm process.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 graphics card is the first in the Nvidia GeForce 500 series to use a fully enabled chip based on the refreshed Fermi architecture, with all 16 stream multiprocessors clusters and all six 64-bit memory controllers active. The new GF110 GPU was enhanced with full speed FP16 filtering (the previous generation GF100 GPU could only do half-speed FP16 filtering) and improved z-culling units.

On January 25, 2011, Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, to target the "sweet spot" segment where price/performance ratio is considered important. With its more than 30% improvement over the GTX 460, and performance in between the Radeon HD 6870 and 6950 1GB, the GTX 560 Ti directly replaced the GeForce GTX 470.

On February 17, 2011, it was reported that the GeForce GTX 550 Ti would be launching on March 15, 2011. Although the GTX 550 Ti is a GF116 mainstream chip, Nvidia chose to name its new card the GTX 550 Ti, and not the GTS 550. Performance was shown to be at least comparable and up to 12% faster than the current Radeon HD 5770. Price-wise, the new card trod into the range occupied by the GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB) and the Radeon HD 6790.^[2]

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.^[3]

On April 13, 2011, the GT 520 was launched as the bottom-end card in the range, with lower performance than the equivalent number cards in the two previous generations, the GT 220 and the GT 420. However, it supported DirectX 11 and was more powerful than the GeForce 210, the GeForce 310, and the integrated graphics options on Intel CPUs.

On May 17, 2011, Nvidia launched a less expensive (non-Ti) version of the GeForce GTX 560 to strengthen Nvidia's price-performance in the $200 range. Like the faster GTX 560 Ti that came before it, this video card was also faster than the GeForce GTX 460. Standard versions of this card performed comparably to the AMD Radeon HD 6870, and would eventually replace the GeForce GTX 460. Premium versions of this card operate at higher speed (factory overclocked), and are slightly faster than the Radeon 6870, approaching the performance of basic versions of the Radeon HD 6950 and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti.

On November 28, 2011, Nvidia launched the "GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores".^[4] However, it does not use the silicon of the GTX 560 series: it is a GF110 chip with two shader blocks disabled. The most powerful version of the 560 series, this card was widely known to be a "limited production" card and was used as a marketing tool making use of the popularity of the GTX 560 brand for the 2011 Holiday season. The performance of the card resides between the regular 560 Ti and 570.

Counterfeit usage

The cards of this generation, particularly the smaller length 550 Ti model, are common cards of choice by counterfeit resellers, who take the cards and illicitly modify the firmware to have them report as more modern cards such as the GTX 1060 and 1050 Ti models. These cards are then sold via eBay, Taobao, Aliexpress and Wish.com by scammers. They may have a minimum of functionality to ensure at a first glance they appear legitimate, but defects caused by the fake BIOS, manufacturing and software issues will almost always cause crashes in modern games and applications, and if not, the performance will still be extremely poor.^[5]

Products

GeForce 500 (5xx) series

• ¹ Unified shaders: Texture mapping units: Render output units
• ² Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) in the GPU of GF110 architecture contains 32 SPs and 4 SFUs. Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) in the GPU of GF114/116/118 architecture contains 48 SPs and 8 SFUs. Each SP can fulfil up to two single precision operations FMA per clock. Each SFU can fulfil up to four operations SF per clock. The approximate ratio of operations FMA to operations SF is equal 4:1. The theoretical shader performance in single-precision floating point operations (FMA)[''FLOPS_sp'', [[FLOPS|GFLOPS]]] of the graphics card with shader count [''n''] and shader frequency [''f'', GHz], is estimated by the following: FLOPS_sp ˜ f × n × 2. Alternative formula: FLOPS _sp ˜ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA)). [''m''] – SM count. Total Processing Power: FLOPS_sp ˜ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA) + 4 × 4 SFUs) or FLOPS_sp ˜ f × n × 2.5.
• ³ Each SM in the GF110 contains 4 texture filtering units for every texture address unit. The complete GF110 die contains 64 texture address units and 256 texture filtering units.^[6] Each SM in the GF114/116/118 architecture contains 8 texture filtering units for every texture address unit but has doubled both addressing and filtering units.

All products are produced using a 40 nm fabrication process.All products support DirectX 12.0, OpenGL 4.6 and OpenCL 1.1.

GeForce 500M (5xxM) series

The GeForce 500M series for notebook architecture.

• ¹ Unified shaders: Texture mapping units: Render output units

Model	Launch	Code name	Fab (nm)	Bus interface	Core config^1	Clock speed			Fillrate		Memory				API support (version)				Processing Power^2 (GFLOPS)	TDP (watts)	Notes
						Core (MHz)	Shader (MHz)	Memory (MHz)	Pixel (GP/s)	Texture (GT/s)	Size (MiB)	Bandwidth (GB/s)	Bus type	Bus width (bit)	DirectX	OpenGL	OpenCL	Vulkan
GeForce GT 520M	January 5, 2011	GF119	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	48:8:4	740	1480	1600	2.96	5.92	1024	12.8	DDR3	64	12.0 (11_0)	4.6	1.1	142.08	12
GeForce GT 520M		GF108	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	96:16:4	515	1030	1600	2.06	8.24	1024	12.8	DDR3	64					197.76	20	Noticed in Lenovo laptops
GeForce GT 520MX	May 30, 2011	GF119	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	48:8:4	900	1800	1800	3.6	7.2	1024	14.4	DDR3	64					172.8	20
GeForce GT 525M	January 5, 2011	GF108	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	96:16:4	600	1200	1800	2.4	9.6	1024	28.8	DDR3	128					230.4	20-23
GeForce GT 540M	January 5, 2011	GF108	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	96:16:4	672	1344	1800	2.688	10.752	1024	28.8	DDR3	128					258.048	32-35
GeForce GT 550M	January 5, 2011	GF108	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	96:16:4	740	1480	1800	2.96	11.84	1024	28.8	DDR3	128					284.16	32-35
GeForce GT 555M	January 5, 2011	GF106 GF108	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	144:24:24 144:24:16 96:16:4	590 650 753	1180 1300 1506	1800 1800 3138	14.6 10.4 3	14.6 15.6 12	1536 2048 1024	43.2 28.8 50.2	DDR3 DDR3 GDDR5	192 128 128					339.84 374.4 289.15	30-35
GeForce GTX 560M	May 30, 2011	GF116	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	192:32:16 192:32:24	775	1550	2500	18.6	24.8	2048 1536, 3072	40.0 60.0	GDDR5	128 192					595.2	75
GeForce GTX 570M^[7]	June 28, 2011	GF114	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	336:56:24	575	1150	3000	13.8	32.2	1536	72.0	GDDR5	192					772.8	75
GeForce GTX 580M	June 28, 2011	GF114	40	PCIe 2.0 x16	384:64:32	620	1240	3000	19.8	39.7	2048	96.0	GDDR5	256					952.3	100

Chipset table

GeForce 500 (5xx) series

Model	Launch	Code name	Fab (nm)	Transistors (million)	Die size (mm^2)	Bus interface	SM count	Core config	Clock rate			Fillrate		Memory configuration				Supported API version				Processing power (GFLOPS)		TDP (watts)	Release Price (USD)
									Core (MHz)	Shader (MHz)	Memory (MHz)	Pixel (GP/s)	Texture (GT/s)	Size (MB)	Bandwidth (GB/s)	DRAM type	Bus width (bit)	Vulkan	Direct3D	OpenGL	OpenCL^8	Single precision	Double precision
GeForce 510	September 29, 2011	GF119	TSMC 40 nm	292	79	PCIe 2.0 x16	1	48:8:4	523	1046	1800	2.1	4.5	1024 2048	14.4	DDR3	64	n/a^[8]	12 FL 11_1	4.6	1.1	100.4		25	OEM
GeForce GT 520	April 12, 2011					PCIe 2.0 x16 PCIe 2.0 x1 PCI			810	1620		3.25	6.5		14.4							155.5		29	$59
GeForce GT 530^[9]	May 14, 2011	GF108-220		585	116	PCIe 2.0 x16	2	96:16:4	700	1400		2.8	11.2		28.8		128					268.8	22.40	50	OEM
GeForce GT 545		GF116		~1170	~238		3	144:24:16	720	1440		11.52	17.28	1536 3072	43		192					415.07		70	$149
									870	1740	3996	13.92	20.88	1024	64	GDDR5	128					501.12		105	OEM
GeForce GTX 550 Ti	March 15, 2011	GF116-400					4	192:32:24	900	1800	4104	21.6	28.8	768+256 1536	65.7+32.8 98.5		128+64 192					691.2		116	$149
GeForce GTX 555	May 14, 2011	GF114		1950	332		6	288:48:24	736	1472	3828	17.6	35.3	1024	91.9		128+64					847.9		150	OEM
GeForce GTX 560 SE	February 20, 2012^[10]	GF114-200-KB-A1
GeForce GTX 560	May 17, 2011	GF114-325-A1					7	336:56:32	810	1620	4008	25.92	45.36	1024 2048	128.1		256					1088.6			$199
GeForce GTX 560 Ti	January 25, 2011	GF114-400-A1					8	384:64:32	822	1645		26.3	52.61		128.26							1263.4	110	170	$249
	May 30, 2011	GF110		3000^[11]	520		11	352:44:40	732	1464	3800<	--according to Field explanations-->	29.28	32.21	1280 2560		152					320	1030.7	128.83	210	OEM
GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores	November 29, 2011	GF110-270-A1					14	448:56:40				40.99		1280	1311.7								163.97	$289
GeForce GTX 570	December 7, 2010	GF110-275-A1					15	480:60:40				43.92		1280 2560	1405.4								175.68	219	$349
GeForce GTX 580	November 9, 2010	GF110-375-A1					16	512:64:48	772	1544	4008	37.05	49.41	1536 3072	192.384		384					1581.1	197.63	244^[12]	$499
GeForce GTX 590	March 24, 2011	2x GF110-351-A1		2x 3000	2x 520		2x16	2x 512:64:48	607	1215	3414	2x29.14	2x38.85	2x 1536	2x163.87		2x384					2488.3	311.04	365	$699
Model	Launch	Code name	Fab (nm)	Transistors (million)	Die size (mm^2)	Bus interface	SM count	Core config	Clock rate			Fillrate		Memory configuration				Supported API version				Processing power (GFLOPS)		TDP (Watts)	Release Price (USD)
									Core (MHz)	Shader (MHz)	Memory (MHz)	Pixel (GP/s)	Texture (GT/s)	Size (MB)	Bandwidth (GB/s)	DRAM type	Bus width (bit)	Vulkan	Direct3D	OpenGL	OpenCL^8	Single precision	Double precision

Discontinued support

Nvidia announced that after Release 390 drivers, it will no longer release 32-bit drivers for 32-bit operating systems.^[13]

Nvidia announced in April 2018 that Fermi will transition to legacy driver support status and be maintained until January 2019.^[14]

See also

• GeForce 200 series
• GeForce 400 series
• GeForce 600 series
• GeForce 700 series
• GeForce 800M series
• GeForce 900 series
• GeForce 10 series
• Nvidia Quadro
• Nvidia Tesla

Notes

• Web site: Inside Fermi: Nvidia's HPC Push . David Kanter . realworldtech.com . September 30, 2009 . December 16, 2010.

External links

• GeForce GTX 590
• GeForce GTX 580
• GeForce GTX 570
• GeForce GTX 560 Ti
• GeForce GTX 560 Ti (OEM)
• GeForce GTX 560
• GeForce GTX 560 (OEM)
• GeForce GTX 550 Ti
• GeForce GT 545 GDDR5 (OEM)
• GeForce GT 545 DDR3
• GeForce GT 530 (OEM)
• GeForce GT 520
• GeForce GT 520 (OEM)
• GeForce 510 (OEM)
• GeForce GTX 580M
• GeForce GTX 570M
• GeForce GTX 560M
• GeForce GT 555M
• GeForce GT 550M
• GeForce GT 540M
• GeForce GT 525M
• GeForce GT 520MX
• GeForce GT 520M
• Nvidia Nsight
• techPowerUp! GPU Database

Notes and References

1. News: Killian. Zak. Nvidia finally lets Fermi GPU owners enjoy DirectX 12. July 4, 2017. Tech Report. July 3, 2017.
2. Web site: GeForce GTX 550 Ti To Launch On 15 March . February 18, 2011 . February 18, 2011 . https://web.archive.org/web/20110218221352/http://vr-zone.com/articles/nvidia-geforce-gtx-550-ti-to-launch-on-march-15/11229.html . dead .
3. News: ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 graphics card reviewed and rated. Hexus. May 29, 2018. en-GB.
4. Web site: Smith . Ryan . 2011-11-09 . NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti w/448 Cores: GTX 570 On A Budget .
5. Web site: Burke. Steve. Fake "GTX 1050 1GB" Scam GPU Benchmark & Review. 2020-12-19. www.gamersnexus.net.
6. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4008/nvidias-geforce-gtx-580/2 Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined
7. Web site: Graphics Cards, Gaming, Laptops, and Virtual Reality from NVIDIA GeForce.
8. Web site: The Khronos Group . 31 May 2022 .
9. Web site: NVIDIA GeForce GT 530 OEM Specs. September 25, 2022. TechPowerUp.
10. Web site: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 SE Specs . 2018-08-06 .
11. Web site: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined . November 9, 2010 . . Ryan Smith . November 9, 2010 . https://web.archive.org/web/20101110202636/http://www.anandtech.com/show/4008/nvidias-geforce-gtx-580 . November 10, 2010 . live .
12. Web site: Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 1536 MB Review . TechPowerUp . 2010-11-09 . 2015-12-11 . https://web.archive.org/web/20151222085437/http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_580/3.html . 2015-12-22 . live .
13. Web site: Support Plan for 32-bit and 64-bit Operating Systems | NVIDIA.
14. Web site: Support Plan for Fermi series GeForce GPUs | NVIDIA.