Kelvin (microarchitecture)

Kelvin is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 2001, as the successor to Celsius microarchitecture. It was named with reference to William Thomson (Baron Kelvin) and used with the GeForce 4 and 3 series.

Graphics features

• DirectX 8.0(8.1 in the original Xbox)
• OpenGL 1.2 (1.5)
• Shader Model 1.3
• Vertex Shader 1.1
• Max VRAM size bumped to 128MB
• New memory controller with Z compression

Chips

GeForce 3 (3xxx) series

• NV20, 57 million transistor

GeForce 4 (4xxx) series

• NV2A (Xbox GPU), 57 million transistor
• NV25, 63 million transistor
• NV28, 36 million transistor
• NV17
• NV18

GPU list

GeForce 3 (3xxx) series

GeForce 4 (4xxx) series

See also

• List of eponyms of Nvidia GPU microarchitectures
• List of Nvidia graphics processing units
• Qualcomm Adreno
• Scalable Link Interface (SLI)

References

1. Rankine (microarchitecture)
2. Kelvin (disambiguation)
3. List of things named after Lord Kelvin
4. GeForce 3 series
5. GeForce 4 series
6. List of eponyms of Nvidia GPU microarchitectures
7. Celsius (microarchitecture)
8. Quadro
9. Alessandro Volta
10. André-Marie Ampère
11. Intel i960
12. Frailty syndrome
13. List of Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
14. List of Chinese Americans
15. 2012 in science