Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 White Paper

Also see for GeForce GTX 980: Installation guide Installation guide

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 White Paper Manual pdf 5 page image

GeForce GTX 980 Whitepaper INTRODUCTION5Dramatic Leap Forward In Lighting with VXGILighting is the biggest hurdle in computer graphics that must be overcome in order to achievephotorealism. Global illumination gets us significantly closer to achieving this goal. Global illumination isoften used in the movie industry to produce CG scenes that look stunning, but rendering truly dynamicglobal illumination in real time on the GPU has been impractical until now.NVIDIA Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI) is the next big leap forward in lighting. VXGI is based on theconcept pioneered by NVIDIA researcher Cyril Crassin in 2011, of using a 3D data structure (“voxels”) tocapture coverage and lighting information at every point in the scene. This data structure can then betraced during the final rendering stage to accurately determine the effect of light bouncing around inthe scene.Cyril’s original implementation relied on voxels that were stored in an octree structure. While it was ableto run successfully on a GeForce GTX 680, it had limitations. We’ve spent the last three years developingan implementation that can be accelerated natively by the GPU, as well as improving the algorithm. Theresult of that effort is VXGI.VXGI provides dramatically improved performance for global illumination. While VXGI’s softwarealgorithm will run on all GPUs, the performance benefits of VXGI hardware acceleration will only beavailable on our latest Maxwell GPUs.The first graphics cards to ship with our new GM204 GPU are the GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX970. For simplicity purposes we’ll be focusing solely on the GeForce GTX 980 in this document. With2048 CUDA Cores and 4GB of GDDR5 memory, GM204 is the fastest GPU in the world, yet with a TDP ofjust 165W, it’s also the most efficient.