GeForce is a consumer branding for graphics cards designed by NVIDIA. They are generally geared for the gamer community of computer users. There have been six generations of GeForce cards, with each new generation, pushing the previous technology into the budget segment of the market.

The first card called the GeForce 256 was launched in August 1999, and was the most powerful consumer card at the time. This was later updated with faster memory to the GeForce DDR, which held an even greater lead against its opponents.

The GeForce 2 GTS was launched in April 2000, and was generally faster than its competitors - the ATI Radeon and Voodoo 5 5500. The real success story of this generation was the budget GeForce 2 MX, which (MX200 and later MX400 variants) remains one of the best-selling consumer-level cards of all time.

GeForce 3 was introduced next in February 2001, and despite outperforming its competitors considerably and offering shader support, it failed to deliver a compelling mix of pricing and performance.

As usual nVidia learned from their mistakes, and GeForce 4 duly followed in February 2002, as a high end TI range developed from the GeForce 3 part (later adapted for the X-Box), and a budget MX part. Many commentators objected to the budget naming convention, citing the fact the GeForce 4 MX was better understood internally as an updated GeForce 2 card with an improved memory controller. Regardless, the GeForce 4 MX sold in huge volumes as an OEM favorite, providing unrivalled performance, with superb driver support, for the budget consumer of the period.

GeForce FX followed on in November 2002, named in order to create the impression it was a cinematic effects grade class of card. NVidia released a number of famous demos in this period to show off the capabilities of the cards. However, possibly distracted by the X-Box and nForce development work, the FX series suffered from poor shader performance – the key cinematic feature of Direct-X 9. It was only towards the end of the product cycle of the FX range and the 5700 Ultra, that actual hardware shader performance improved. Otherwise, the FX series shader performance was typically at least half as fast as its equivalent competition from ATI.

The current line is the GeForce 6 series, first launched in April 2004. In contrast to the FX series it has excellent shader performance, and even implements Vertex Shader 3.0 and Pixel Shader 3.0, absent from the x800 series of cards sold by ATI. Currently there are 8 models for the GeForce 6 Series; in decreasing order of performance:

• GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme
• GeForce 6800 Ultra
• GeForce 6800 GT 128 or 256 MB
• GeForce 6800 128 MB
• GeForce 6600 GT 128MB
• GeForce 6600 128MB
• GeForce 6200
• GeForce 6200 TC (Turbo Cache)

GeForce Card Generations in Order of Launch

• GeForce 256
• GeForce 2
• GeForce 3
• GeForce 4
• GeForce FX
• GeForce 6