GeForce GTX 980 Whitepaper
GM204 HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE
IN-DEPTH
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Finally, if the block cannot be compressed in any of these modes, then the GPU will write out data
uncompressed, preserving the lossless rendering requirement.
However, the effectiveness of delta color compression depends on the specifics of which pixel ordering
is chosen for the delta color calculation. Maxwell contains our third generation of delta color
compression, which improves effectiveness by offering more choices of delta calculation to the
compressor.
Thanks to the improvements in caching and compression in Maxwell, the GPU is able to significantly
reduce the number of bytes that have to be fetched from memory per frame. In tests with a variety of
games, Maxwell uses roughly 25% fewer bytes per frame compared to Kepler. This means that from the
perspective of the GPU core, a Kepler-style memory system running at 9.3Gbps would provide effective
bandwidth similar to the bandwidth that Maxwell’s enhanced memory system provides.
New Display and Video Engines
As the rapid adoption rate of 4K displays shows, consumer demand for high resolution devices has
intensified this year. To meet this demand, all Maxwell GPUs ship with a display engine capable of
supporting resolutions up to 5K. In addition, up to four 4K MST displays can be driven by the GPU,
compared to a maximum of two 4K MST displays in Kepler.
GeForce GTX 980 is also the world’s first GPU to support HDMI 2.0. Whereas the previous generation,
HDMI 1.4, can support 4K display at 30Hz for “444” RGB pixels, and 60Hz for “420” YUV pixels, with
HDMI 2.0, the GPU can now drive full-resolution “444” RGB pixels at 4K resolution at 60Hz.
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