The Fermi Architecture The GeForce GTX 400 family of GPUs is
based on NVIDIA’s Fermi architecture. The Fermi architecture is
the most significant leap forward in GPU architecture since the
original G80. G80 was our initial vision of what a unified
graphics and compute processor should look like. GT200 extended
the performance and functionality of G80. With Fermi, we have
taken all we have learned from the two prior processors,
analyzed the various applications that were written for them,
and developed a completely new architecture optimized for next
generation games and applications. Parallel Tessellation Engines
Traditional GPU designs use a single geometry engine to perform
tessellation. This approach is analogous to early GPU designs
which used a single pixel pipeline to perform pixel shading.
Having observed how pixel pipelines grew from a single unit to
many parallel units and its subsequent impact on 3D realism, we
designed our tessellation architecture to be parallel from day
one. Fermi GPUs implement