Celsius is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 1999. It was named with reference to Anders Celsius and used with the GeForce 256 and GeForce 2 series.
Contents
Naming convention
While Celsius was not used as a marketing name at the time of the GeForce 256's launch in 1999, the public name was first used by the nouveau Linux driver, and much later on the Nvidia website.
The company's naming convention using famous scientists for its microarchitectures only became standard practice starting with the Tesla/Fermi generations.
Graphics features
Feature
The transform and lighting hardware
API
DirectX 7.0
OpenGL 1.2 (1.5)
Memory
Max VRAM size bumped to 128MB
Chips
GeForce 256
NV10, 17 million transistor
GeForce 2 series
NV11, 20 million transistor
NV15, 25 million transistor
NV17, 29 million transistor
NV18, 29 million transistor
Crush11, 20 million transistor
Crush17, 29 million transistor