| NVIDIA nTeresting - Oct 9, 2009 |
| Written by NVIDIA | ||
| Friday, 09 October 2009 | ||
NVIDIA nTeresting - Oct 9, 2009In this Issue:
GTC Was a HitWith a weekend under their belt, many of the journalists that attended GTC had a chance to reflect on their experiences from the week prior. GTC featured hours of presentations, and only a few of those hours were presentations by NVIDIA. "After you left, you thought, "I can't wait to tell everyone I know about this experience." ... It felt like that in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose last week, where 1500 brilliant people--CEOs, CTOs, researchers, scientists, programmers, inventors, PhD candidates, entrepreneurs, and financiers--from universities, established companies, visual effects studios, animation studios, software vendors, venture capital companies, and approximately 60 start-ups attended sessions, shared ideas, announced products, and learned from each other at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC), September 30 to October 2." Many felt that the conference reflected the new future of the PC-- the GPU and the CPU used together as co-processors. "What GPU computing does is shift applications from the CPU to the GPU and from a largely serial process to a massively parallel one. It isn't easy, but the result of this transition is amazing. I spent most of last week hearing story after story about firms that were using this new development process to do medical, geological and other scientific research that used to take weeks and months -- and required booking time on supercomputers -- in hours and on their desktops. This is the kind of advancement that can move an industry or a culture in large steps, because the rate of change is accelerated in a number of critical areas at once. Then, often seemingly suddenly, the combined impact of all the changes results in a gestalt that causes the affected group to perceive the world differently." We could look back in a few years and realize that the first GTC was a watershed moment for the PC industry. "The last time we had this much excitement in the technology industry was in its infancy, and companies like Apple and Microsoft were trying to get developers excited about the products they were bringing to market. This, the first GPU developers' conference, appears to be heralding a resurgence of excitement and innovation for an industry that desperately needs it." All in all, the first GTC was a huge success. In conclusion, GTC was a success. One could even say GTC was ‘The way it's meant to be conferenced'." Book early for next year. NVIDIA's Developer Relations Team Helps Move PC Gaming Forward A sorted tale has played out this week and PC gamers are central to the storyline. It started years ago with AMD constantly mispositioning our "The Way Its Meant To Be Played" as a pay to play marketing scheme. I will tell you this: NVIDIA's developer relations team is like a rolling ball of butcher knives. "But without a doubt, NVIDIA's development efforts in this area are much more extensive. The developer relations team at NVIDIA is significantly larger, has a significantly larger budget and in general works with more developers than AMD's." But it is not about checks and bags of money. We have piles of tools for DirectX, OpenGL, OpenCL and CUDA. We have piles of sample code. We have over 50 engineers who go onsite and add effects, fix bugs, tweak performance and train developers in open standards and standards that allow NVIDIA to innovate for our customers. We have a lab that runs developers games through THOUSANDS of PC configurations (both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs) for QA purposes. We work very hard to make games work flawless and to make games more engaging and fun to play. Rule #1 is "do no harm" and we do not go in to break AMD GPUs or make them work slower. "Tamasi later went onto say that "no game developer on the planet is going to let us do anything to a game which prevents it from running on ATI, or having a good experience. Whenever we go to do something, the first principle we apply is 'do no harm' - you never make it worse than before you went in. Ever." The battle continued with a post by AMD's Ian McNaughton in his blog. In an odd move, he implies that the reason for AMD's issues with Resident Evil 5, Need for Speed: Shift and Batman: Arkham Asylum is not failure by AMD's Dev Rel Team, but because developers are essentially taking payoffs from NVIDIA. "Where we have issue is when co-marketing dollars from other companies are used to limit our engineering optimizations or in anyway hinder our ability to make sure our customers have a good experience with the game on our products..." He also says these titles are "proprietary" which implies that AMD does not support them and you should not play them on AMD hardware. "There are some known issues with these proprietary TWIMTBP titles. And AMD's David Hoff chimed in on Bullet Physics development with this comment about the creator of Bullet Physics, Erwin Coumins: "When I questioned Dave about the quote from above number three and four he told me that Erwin would not know because he is irrelevant and ATI has their own team from Bullet working with them. Honestly I was perplexed; Erwin to the best of my knowledge is the main developer for Bullet. So I had to send Erwin an email asking about Dave's comment. Erwin's direct answer: "I'm the main author of the Bullet physics library, and lead a small team developing it within Sony Computer Entertainment US R&D. Does that sound irrelevant?" TWIMTBP is not exclusive and AMD can engage TWIMTBP partners if they decide too. Key word being "if". "Eidos told us in an email conversation that the offer was made to AMD for them to send engineers to their studios and do the same work NVIDIA did for its own hardware, but AMD declined." Some people see NVIDIA working with game developers as a good thing. "If ATI offered the same level of service NVIDIA seems to be offering to developers, of the gaming persuasion or otherwise, we reckon everyone would benefit." "This is not something you need to apologize for and the good thing that comes from TWIMTBP is that games do look better than on consoles and this is a really important for the overall future of gaming." TWIMTBP makes PC games better. Making PC games better is good for the gaming industry. Making PC games better is good for gamers. Making PC games better is really just innovation. Nothing you blog or tweet will make the PC gaming experience better for your customers. AMD should stop complaining and roll up their sleeves and do some real engineering work. Flash 10.1 Gets FasterAt Adobe's worldwide developer conference we learned that Adobe and NVIDIA Corporation are bringing uncompromised browsing of rich Web content to netbooks, smartphones and smartbooks built with NVIDIA GPUs. The companies have been working closely together as part of the Open Screen Project to optimize and dramatically improve performance of Flash Player 10.1 by taking advantage of GPU video and graphics acceleration on a wide range of mobile Internet devices. "The GPU acceleration for Flash is the real deal, for sure, though-I watched a Star Trek trailer on YouTube HD on an NVIDIA Ion-powered HP Mini 311 output to an external monitor, even, and it ran flawlessly. Which, if you've ever tried to play an HD Flash clip, even on full-fledged systems it molests CPU cycles, so just working on a $400 netbook very nearly deserves applause." Better get yours now, because CNET has just named ION-powered notebooks and the ION-powered Lenovo IdeaPad S12 "Hot for the Holidays" and Laptop Magazine gave the ION-powered HP Mini 311 an Editor's Choice. This is another example of visual computing and highlights the need for a balanced PC that uses the GPU and CPU as co-processors. CUDA wins!Laptop Magazine has done a round up of GPU encoders for video and Badaboom got the Editor's Choice. A no-fuss application, Badaboom virtually makes video conversion a one-step process. The model for GPU Computing is to use a GPU and CPU together as co-processors. From the user's perspective, the application just runs faster because it is using the high-performance of the GPU to boost performance. NVIDIA Staying in the Mid and High-EndIt is ridiculous that I even have to type that headline. The fact that we are leaders in GPU computing should not be misinterpreted. NVIDIA is still very focused on the gaming market.
"NVIDIA also assured me with a chuckle that they are not 'abandoning the mid or high end markets'. nTeresting sidebar.....just sayin'. NVIDIA is Driving OpenCLWe believe that innovation is good for gamers, and not innovating punishes gamers. We support open standards, plus standards that allow NVIDIA to innovate in a timely fashion, the way CUDA C and PhysX does. Let's start with OpenCL. AMD has been trying to paint NVIDIA as the evil proprietary CUDA/PhysX devil. Obvious attempt of trying to exploit the hyped ‘open' term in the name OpenCL (apparently they were so committed to open standards that they originally had their own proprietary Stream/Brook+/CAL infrastructure, and they needed Apple to propose the OpenCL standard, rather than AMD proposing one itself. Pot, kettle, black, AMD!). So far so good. However, AMD, YOU DON'T HAVE IT! That's right, you're pushing OpenCL as an alternative to CUDA/PhysX GPU-acceleration, but you don't actually have any drivers or an SDK or anything! What's worse, NVIDIA, that company that you try to discredit for not using open standards, DOES! Let take a closer look at the OpenCL timeline and see if it indicates who is supporting open standards better:
Now let's look at the OpenCL physic solution, Bullet Physics which AMD claims to be driving. "Bullet's GPU acceleration via OpenCL will work with any compliant drivers, we use NVIDIA GeForce cards for our development and even use code from their OpenCL SDK, they are a great technology partner." If you do not support standards that allow you to innovate for your customers AND you are not really supporting open standards either, what do you support? Benchmark Reviews offers several NVIDIA GeForce articles in our Featured Reviews: Video Cards section. Related Articles: |
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