Pascal is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, as the successor to the Maxwell architecture.

[2] The architecture is named after the 17th century French mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal.

In April 2019, Nvidia enabled a software implementation of DirectX Raytracing on Pascal-based cards starting with the GTX 1060 6 GB, and in the 16 series cards, a feature reserved to the Turing-based RTX series up to that point.

While all CU versions consist of 64 shader processors (i.e. 4 SIMD Vector Units, each 16 lanes wide), Nvidia experimented with very different numbers of CUDA cores: The Polymorph Engine version 4.0 is the unit responsible for Tessellation.

The theoretical half-precision processing power of a Pascal GPU is 2× of the single precision performance on GP100[12] and 1/64 on GP104, GP106, GP107 & GP108.