Curie (microarchitecture)
Curie is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 2004, as the successor to Rankine microarchitecture. It was named with reference to the French physicist Marie Curie and used with the GeForce 6 and 7 series. Curie was followed by Tesla.

Graphics Features 

 DirectX 9.0c (9_3)
 OpenGL 2.1
 Shader Model 3.0
 First gen of Nvidia PureVideo
 Z compression came back
 Better Anti aliasing 4x
 Max VRAM size bumped to 512MB

The lack of unified shaders makes DirectX 9.0c the last supported version of DirectX for GPUs based on this microarchitecture.

Chips

GeForce 6 (6xxx) series 

 MCP51
 MCP61
 NV44
 NV43
 NV42
 NV41
 NV40

GeForce 7 (7xxx) series 
 MCP68S
 MCP67QV
 MCP73
 MCP76
 G73
 G72
 G71
 G70

GPU list

GeForce 6 (6xxx) series

GeForce 7 (7xxx) series

See also 

 List of Nvidia graphics processing units
 Nvidia PureVideo
 Scalable Link Interface (SLI)
 Qualcomm Adreno

References 

GPGPU
Nvidia Curie
Nvidia microarchitectures
Parallel computing
Graphics cards