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 Direct3D 12.0 (feature level 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.
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.
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". 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.
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)[FLOPSsp, GFLOPS] of the graphics card with shader count [n] and shader frequency [f, GHz], is estimated by the following: FLOPSsp ˜ f × n × 2. Alternative formula: FLOPS sp ˜ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA)). [m] – SM count. Total Processing Power: FLOPSsp ˜ f × m × (32 SPs × 2(FMA) + 4 × 4 SFUs) or FLOPSsp ˜ 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.Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580: Fermi Refined 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 config1 Clock speed Fillrate Memory API support (version) Processing Power2 (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 rowspan="10" 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 GF106GF108 40 PCIe 2.0 x16 144:24:24144:24:1696:16:4 590650753 118013001506 180018003138 14.610.43 14.615.612 153620481024 43.228.850.2 DDR3DDR3GDDR5 192128128 339.84374.4289.15 30-35 GeForce GTX 560M May 30, 2011 GF116 40 PCIe 2.0 x16 192:32:16192:32:24 775 1550 2500 18.6 24.8 20481536, 3072 40.060.0 GDDR5 128192 595.2 75 GeForce GTX 570M 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 (mm2) 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 OpenCL8 Single precision Double precision GeForce 510 September 29, 2011 GF119TSMC 40 nm 292 79 PCIe 2.0 x16 1 48:8:4 523 1046 1800 2.1 4.5 10242048 14.4 DDR3 64 n/a 12 (11_0) 4.6 1.1 100.4 25 OEM GeForce GT 520 April 12, 2011 PCIe 2.0 x16PCIe 2.0 x1PCI 810 1620 3.25 6.5 14.4 155.5 29 59 GeForce GT 530 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 15363072 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+2561536 65.7+32.898.5 128+64192 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 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 520 11 352:44:40 732 1464 3800 29.28 32.21 12802560 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 15363072 192.384 384 1581.1 197.63 244 499 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 (mm2) 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 OpenCL8 Single precision Double precision
Support Nvidia announced that after Release 390 drivers, it will no longer release 32-bit drivers for 32-bit operating systems.
Nvidia announced in April 2018 that Fermi will transition to legacy driver support status and be maintained until January 2019.
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.
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
References
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