Background
Nvidia Corporation is a graphics chip designer, system chip designer, computing and API designer, founded in 1993, USA. The company started with graphics accelerators, with their first release, the NV1 in 1995, but Nvidia didn't get a reputation in the graphics market until the NV3 and NV4 graphic accelerators in 1997, and 1998. Since then Nvidia has had heavy focus on computing, integration and software infrastructure, releasing the CUDA framework in 2006, a computing platform and API for accelerated processing used by researchers and super computers. They've in 2012 made breakthroughs with Artificial Intelligence. Nvidia is also in the automotive industry, powering the digitization and infrastructure of cars, manufacturing and engineering, in the healthcare industry with AI adaptation and use of performance computing and the data center industry with infrastructure and computing.
Nvidia began the GeForce product family in 1999 with the GeForce 256, a 220 nm technology with a 120 MHz clock and 32MB of video memory. The product range focuses on the performance computing and gamers, and introduced the GTX as a suffix in 2005 with the GeForce 7800 GTX, which later became a widely known prefix in their consumer graphics card lineup from 2008 until the release of the GTX 16 series in 2020. Along with the GeForce GTX series, Nvidia ran the Nvidia Quadro family of GPUs, intended for workstations and professional use from 2000 until 2020, the Quadro family were the first products to receive many features that later became a staple in the RTX family.
The GeForce RTX series graphic cards was first released in 2018, with the RTX 20 series, replacing both the GeForce GTX and the Nvidia Quadro product families. The new family of GPUs brought realtime hardware ray tracing, something that previously only been done in non-realtime task such as CGI. Along with ray tracing the RTX series brought AI-acceleration, new asset formats, and support for ray tracing acceleration engines such as Nvidia OptiX, Microsoft DXR and Vulkan.
Identification
To identify your graphics card in Windows, open:
- Nvidia Control Panel
- Select Help in the navigation bar
- The GPU model name will be shown in the items tab.
To identify your graphics card in a Linux environment, see this How-To-Geek's gudie.
Additional Information
Additional sources and Further reading
团队
