Previously, textures needed to be bound by the CPU to a particular slot in a fixed-size table before the GPU could reference them. Kepler also introduced a new form of texture handling known as bindless textures. This is not only because the cores are more power efficient (two Kepler cores using about 90% of the power of one Fermi core, according to Nvidia's numbers), but also because the reduction in clock speed delivers a 50% reduction in power consumption in that area. By abandoning the shader clock found in their previous GPU designs, efficiency is increased, even though it requires more cores to achieve similar levels of performance.
The primary way Nvidia achieved this goal was through the use of a unified clock. Where the goal of the previous architecture, Fermi, was to increase raw performance (particularly for compute and tessellation), Nvidia's goal with the Kepler architecture was to increase performance per watt, while still striving for overall performance increases. They served as the introduction of the Kepler architecture. The GeForce 600 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, first released in 2012. Security updates for Kepler until September 2024