| NVIDIA nTeresting - October 2, 2009 |
| Written by Brian Burke - NVIDIA | ||
| Friday, 02 October 2009 | ||
NVIDIA nTeresting - October 2, 2009In this issue:
GPU Technology Conference 2009 This week all the big brains in GPU Computing converged in San Jose to take part in the GPU Technology Conference 2009. NVIDIA made several big announcements around the event. At the keynote event we introduced our highly anticipated new next-generation CUDA GPU architecture, codenamed "Fermi". An entirely new ground-up design, the "Fermi"TM architecture is the foundation for the world's first computational graphics processing units (GPUs), delivering breakthroughs in both graphics and GPU computing. "The chip will create ungodly beautiful graphics for gamers, but it will also be aimed at scientists doing elaborate simulations of global warming, the weather, and other things that only supercomputers could once do." "NVIDIA Fermi is one fantastic chip." Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) announced plans for a new supercomputer that will use NVIDIA GPUs based on the "Fermi" architecture. Used to pursue research in areas such as energy and climate change, ORNL's supercomputer is expected to be 10-times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputer. "Fermi GPUs would enable "substantial scientific breakthroughs" that would be impossible without the new technology, said Jeff Nichols, Oak Ridge's associate lab director for Computing and Computational Sciences, in a statement." mental images, an NVIDIA company, unveiled iray - the first fully GPU accelerated, commercially supported, turn-key rendering solution for a wide range of 3D graphics application developers. iray technology leverages NVIDIA GPUs to deliver unbelievably fast photorealism to designers, engineers and consumers. "With it, graphics professionals can get access to computing resources that can render 3-D images in minutes instead of hours without compromising the quality and amount of detail in an image, said Jon Peddie, graphics analyst at Jon Peddie Research." We also introduced NVIDIA Nexus, the industry's first development environment for massively parallel computing that is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, the world's most popular development environment for Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services. "NVIDIA Nexus is going to improve programmer productivity immediately," said Tarek El Dokor at Edge 3 Technologies. "An integrated GPU and CPU development solution is something Edge 3 has needed for a long time. The fact that it's integrated into the Visual Studio development environment drastically reduces the learning curve." The conference encompassed three simultaneous events -- the Emerging Companies Summit, the GPU Developer Summit, and the NVIDIA Research Summit. Attendees learned about the shifts occurring in computing, previewed disruptive technologies, obtained tools and techniques that could impact mission-critical projects now, and networked with experts and peers from a broad range of fields. 3D Vision Mash-up NVIDIA 3D Vision continues to get rave reviews from those that try it. "Truly a feast for the eyes... and especially with those game titles which have 3D vision support incorporated from the beginning on by the manufacturer. Particularly fine examples are the upcoming titles Resident Evil 5 and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Both have been optimized on the PC for 3D vision to deliver a wonderfully vivid picture in 3D mode." "Resident Evil 5 is without doubt the best experience available today: a fantastic depth of field (among other things, fully adjustable) accompanies the gameplay more intense, and the solutions applied to the graphic-stage by 3D Vision are many and absolutely justified" You can see 3D Vision in action if you happen to be in Hollywood this weekend. Zombies, blood and brains will be on display in glorious 3D as the 5th Annual Johnny Ramone Tribute holds the world premiere screening of George Romero's classic horror film, Night of the Living Dead, in 3D on Oct. 3 at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, Calif. To heighten the festivities, NVIDIA will showcase its award-winning 3D Vision stereoscopic 3D technology and give attendees a chance to play this year's hottest horror game, Resident Evil 5, to experience what it's like to have crazed zombies pop out of the computer screen. The event will kick off at dusk with a showing of the full-length, 1977 Ramones concert, It's Alive, screened outdoors against a 24-foot mausoleum wall. You can buy NVIDIA 3D Vision directly from Dell and Alienware etail stores, as a standalone accessory or bundled with a Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ LCD. Dell will be offering this for sale in USA, Canada, Germany, France, and UK. And you can take your own 3D pics and videos with the Fujifilm W1 3D digital camera. "Some gadgets just hit the "awesome" button in the deep, lizard part of your brain. At an NVIDIA meeting Friday, my "awesome" button got smacked hard by the Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1, the world's first point-and-shoot, consumer 3D digital camera." If your GPU does not do 3D Vision, you do not have ‘Graphics Plus'. GeForce Notebook GPUs: The Winning Continues The Alienware M17x continues to be named the fastest notebook on the planet...but what about its little brother, the Alienware M15x? Driver Heaven gave it a Performance Award. "Gaming performance was also decent with the GTX 260M allowing us to play the latest games at resolutions ranging from 1280x720 to 1920x1080. The fact that the system is able to support PhysX is also a real bonus with excellent benefits in games such as Batman Arkham Asylum." With the GeForce 200M Series we have one of the strongest lineups of notebook GPUs in our history. GeForce GPUs offer graphics performance that is second to none, and ‘graphics plus':
PhysX Before and After I just got turned on to a YouTube channel that belongs to "Zogrim". Zogrim does a wonderful job of creating side by side videos with PhysX on and off. He has done it for just about every PhysX-enabled title. Batman: Arkham Asylum, Sacred 2 and others are all there. Spend some time here if you want to see why ‘just graphics' is not enough...you need a GPU with ‘Graphics Plus'. NVIDIA Loves Standards: First with OpenCL Drivers We continue to innovate and push technology forward while providing our customers new drivers and better support than the competition. This week, we became the first company to release OpenCL drivers for the GPU to the public. Bloomberg Begins Using GPUs to Calculate Bond Prices Each night, Bloomberg calculates pricing for 1.3 million hard-to-price asset-backed securities such as collateralized mortgage obligations. Bloomberg had been using 800 CPU cores in a modeling approach but client demand created a need for them to use a better model for overnight pricing. The challenge for Bloomberg was that this new model was more compute intensive and to get it done in an 8 hour window would have required them to scale up to 8,000 CPU cores. In March, Bloomberg began using 48 Tesla cards to do a trillion calculations per second. "Overall, we've achieved an 800% performance increase," Edwards says. "What used to take sixteen hours we're computing in two hours." The GPUs are high speed, running double-precision mathematics at 16 teraflops. And the firm is a little greener now - the server/GPU pairs consume one-third of the energy 1,000 servers would have required and less data center space is occupied". NVIDIA Tesla is paving the way to smaller, higher performance and lower power datacenters. Benchmark Reviews offers several NVIDIA GeForce articles in our Featured Reviews: Video Cards section. Related Articles: |
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