Kelvin (microarchitecture) (Wikipedia Lab Guide)

Kelvin (microarchitecture)

Kelvin is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 2001, as the successor to the Celsius microarchitecture. It was named with reference to William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin and used with the GeForce 3 and 4 series.

While Kelvin was not used as a marketing name at the time of the GeForce3's launch in 2001, the public name was first used by the nouveau Linux driver, and later on the Nvidia website.

Graphics features

DirectX 8.0 (8.1 in the original Xbox)

OpenGL 1.2 (1.5; 1.4 in the original Xbox)

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

Crush11, 20 million transistor

NV17, 29 million transistor

NV18, 29 million transistor

NV25, 63 million transistor

NV28, 36 million transistor

NV2A (Xbox GPU), 57 million transistor

GPU list

GeForce 3 (3xxx) series

GeForce 4 (4xxx) series

Console GPUs

Source

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_(microarchitecture)
Wikipedia API endpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php