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 [GeForce GeForce 4 series|4 series|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
- OpenGL 1.2
- 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">GeForce 3 series">GeForce 3 (3xxx) series
- NV20, 57 million transistor