Curie (microarchitecture)

Curie is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 2004, as the successor to Rankine microarchitecture. It was named with reference to the Polish physicist Marie Salomea Skłodowska–Curie and used with the GeForce 6 and 7 series. Curie was followed by Tesla.

Graphics features

 * DirectX 9.0c (9_3)
 * OpenGL 2.1
 * Shader Model 3.0
 * Nvidia PureVideo (first generation)
 * Reintroduced support for Z compression
 * Hardware support for MSAA anti-aliasing algorithm (up to 4x)

The lack of unified shaders makes DirectX 9.0c the last supported version of DirectX for GPUs based on this microarchitecture.