| NVIDIA nTeresting 16 October 2009 |
| Written by Brian Burke - NVIDIA | ||
| Friday, 16 October 2009 | ||
NVIDIA nTeresting 16 October 2009In this issue:
Verde is Not Just More Green SauceI admit it. I have been drinking the green Kool-aid a long time, but NVIDIA's Verde is more than just more ‘green sauce'. Verde is the name for NVIDIA's notebook drivers. NVIDIA is the only GPU company that gives consumers a way to update drivers for their notebook GPUs. So what? So you should not buy a multi-GPU notebook that does not support driver updates, says Anandtech: "Alienware's M17x is similar, and Alienware even supports ATI HD 4870 CrossFire, but with the mobile driver situation we would recommend sticking with NVIDIA's mobile GPUs -- especially if you plan on running multiple GPUs. That makes the GTX 280M SLI our preferred high-end gaming solution for notebooks, and you have a choice between notebooks like the Eurocom M980NU and Alienware M17x." NVIDIA's quarterly driver release program is a big win for notebook consumers. These drivers allow them to maintain top performance, quickly fix bugs, and unlock the same features and functionality that their desktop counterparts have. You can only get downloadable notebook drivers for NVIDIA GPUs. Pick Your Own Physics PoisonWe support open standards, plus standards that allow NVIDIA to innovate in a timely fashion, the way CUDA C and PhysX does. We want great features to come to games and GPUs as fast as possible.
"In the end, we decided to acquire Ageia because they'd already got a really nice SDK designed for parallel processing - we just did a C for CUDA implementation and we've been doing that ever since. We've also been helping the Bullet Physics guys with their GPU implementation - it's based on our OpenCL samples and they've been using NVIDIA hardware to do their development. We believe that innovation is good. If innovation comes through DirectX, OpenCL, CUDA C, Bullet or PhysX, it does not matter to NVIDIA. Nexus on FilmAt GTC we 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. Nexus will help with development of GPU computing and graphics applications that use CUDA C, OpenCL, DirectCompute, Direct3D, or OpenGL. Nexus offers debugging and profiling functionality that no other vendor offers, all available in the standard development environment Microsoft Visual Studio. You can see it in action here. More GTC Wrap-UpsGTC was an impactful conference that gave attendees a glimpse into the future of computing. GTC coverage continues to trickle in, this time from Hardware Canucks. "The majority of people reading Hardware Canucks right now are gamers and enthusiasts who use their graphics cards for playing games. Unfortunately, we sometimes have a narrow view of the GPU world that centers around review graphs and sky-high framerates, but nowadays there is more to the industry than that. We have to remember that even though NVIDIA is thinking outside of its typical gaming markets, the technologies it is developing within CUDA can and will have positive implications for the gaming community as well. In NVIDIA's world, the role of the GPU hasn't changed. Rather, it has evolved into a tool that can be used to not only show worlds of fantasy but also help unravel medical mysteries or be used in a studio to visualize a movie's special effects. " Industry analyst Jon Peddie put his thought to film and describes GPU computing developments as "astounding" and says: "We truly, truly are at an inflection point in the computer industry at this time." 1920 Cores = High Performance ComputingColfax International introduced the world's first server featuring up to eight NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPUs. The Colfax CXT8000 supports up to eight CPU cores and 1920 GPU cores with nearly eight Teraflops of peak single precision GPU performance in a single 4U system. See it on Geeks3d. "CXT8000 will deliver a compelling solution providing customers access to supercomputing power to handle larger and more complex compute-intensive workloads outside of the datacenter, reduce design and development cycles, and drive new levels of innovation and productivity." The NVIDIA Tesla C1060 transforms a workstation into a high-performance computer that outperforms a small cluster. This gives technical professionals a dedicated computing resource at their desk-side that is much faster and more energy-efficient than a shared cluster in the data center. The Tesla C1060 is based on the massively parallel, many-core Tesla processor, which is coupled with the standard CUDA C programming environment to simplify many-core programming. Jensen in the MercSan Jose Mercury News sat down with NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang to discuss the evolution of the GPU. "The single most important thing for any processor is getting adoption by software developers. We have 90,000 registered developers for CUDA. We've been evangelizing for three years. But the evangelism process was really about supporting the natural pull from the market. The market is dying for a speed-up in computing. And there are all of these new types of applications from computer vision and image processing to CT scan, reconstruction and seismic analysis to weather prediction. There is just so much pent-up demand for more computing resources. So the developers reached out to us and really pulled it out of our hands." Quadro Digital Video Pipeline Changes Film MakingPNY paid a visit to HDWorld 2009 in New York this week and showed off the Quadro Digital Video Pipeline. PNY Technologies, NVIDIA Corporation, Brainstorm and NextComputing demonstrated how broadcast, film and new media production professionals can take advantage of this fully integrated, GPU-based solution for real-time acquisition, processing and delivery of HD video. "NextComputing's integration of the Quadro Digital Video Pipeline into compact, portable workstation computers will enable broadcasters, filmmakers and content providers to take what historically could only be done with a combination of powerful fixed-location systems or rack-mount servers, and now bring it on-location," said Jeff Brown, general manager, NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group. "This level of performance-on-the-go has the potential to radically enhance creativity and accelerate production timelines for film and video professionals. This provides huge benefits to anyone working with high-resolution digital video and graphics who needs the flexibility to utilize this type of production power in the field." The NVIDIA Quadro Digital Video Pipeline is the industry's first fully integrated, GPU-based solution for acquisition, processing and delivery of high resolution video, providing advanced capabilities for graphics rich production and delivery of video for broadcast, post production, film and new media. GeForce GT 220 and 210 Have ArrivedThis week we announced channel availability of the GeForce GT 220 and GeForce 210 GPUs based on NVIDIA's second generation unified architecture. AlienBabelTech gave it an award for innovation and an award for good value. "Add to that the ability to use the GT220 as a PhysX accelerator in the latest games such as Batman: Arkham Asylum, Darkest of Days, video encoding using Mediacoder (Free) or Badaboom ($29.99) and the GT220 suddenly looks like an interesting proposition." These GPUs are based on the same architecture as the GTX 200 series. They are manufactured on the TSMC 40nm process and have some additional features including:
GeForce GPUs offer graphics performance that is second to none, and ‘graphics plus' such as PhysX support for in-game physics and CUDA-support for GPU computing applications. Benchmark Reviews offers related GeForce articles in our Featured Reviews: Video Cards section. |
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