With the PolyMorph Engine, GTX 400 GPUs implement the world’s first scalable geometry pipeline with 15 individual tessellation engines on a single GTX 480 GPU. These engines deliver revolutionary performance in DirectX 11’s most important new graphics feature, GPU-accelerated tessellation. By allowing more detailed geometry to be packed into a scene, tessellation lets developers create more complex environments with beautiful visual clarity. Blocky edges are smoothed out, allowing game characters to be rendered with cinema-quality detail. And since tessellation is only applied to necessary areas, game performance is not compromised.

GTX 400 GPUs implement a brand new 32x anti-aliasing mode for higher levels of image quality. And the GPU’s enhanced compression engine maintains incredible performance with anti-aliasing and resolution cranked up, providing both high framerates and top notch image quality.

The GTX 400 GPU compute architecture was designed to take NVIDIA® PhysX® technology to the next level—making games more lifelike than ever before with advanced effects such as turbulence and fluid dynamics. The new NVIDIA® GigaThreadTM hardware scheduler allows 10 times faster switching between graphics and physics processing, enabling more complex effects to be rendered in real time.

The next generation CUDA architecture accelerates advanced gaming effects for crisper, more realistic visuals. Effects like motion blur, soft shadows, transparency, and depth of field are performed with incredible speed through full Microsoft DirectCompute support and atomic operations that execute up to 20 times faster than prior generation GPUs.

GTX 400 GPUs bring interactive ray tracing to the consumer market for the first time, providing a glimpse into the future of visual realism in games. By tracing the path of light through a 3D scene, ray tracing uses the power of the GPU to create spectacular, photo-realistic visuals. Thanks to the innovative unified cache architecture in GTX 400 GPUs, ray tracing runs up to 3.5 times faster than prior generation GPUs.