| NVIDIA nTeresting: 26 February 2010 |
| Written by NVIDIA - Brian Burke | ||
| Friday, 26 February 2010 | ||
NVIDIA nTeresting: 26 February 2010In This Issue:
And They Said It Couldn't Be Done - Farmville on Tegra-powered TabletsThe naysayers have long argued that the "full" Internet can only be accessed on the x86 architecture and that popular Flash-based games such as Farmville only runs on x86 chips. Well NVIDIA proved them wrong again. At Mobile World Congress 2010, Tegra-powered tablets were all the rage. Combined with Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and AIR, Tegra delivered the ultimate tablet experience to attendees. 78 million users strong, Farmville was expertly demonstrated on a Tegra-powered tablet. After witnessing the demo, Slashgear enthused, "Tegra is powerful enough to run the Flash app full-screen from the Facebook webpage, with the same performance as you'd see on a desktop. NVIDIA has had to make no changes in order for it to be finger-friendly." AIR and Tegra enabled the future of publishing - digital magazines - to appear in full, rich color on tablets. MobileBeat loved how the digital version of Wired looked on a tablet with Tegra! "We can tell you that it offers an incredible experience: This is a device that you will want to touch constantly, that you will want to hug. It includes a sleek touchscreen and an accelerometer." TechEye came away impressed with the one-two punch of Tegra and Flash Player 10.1 at MWC, remarking, "NVIDIA has been steadily chipping away at Intel's long-awaited, much-touted, not-delivered MIDs with its own Tegra offerings, teaming up with the likes of Adobe to make the graphical advantages that much more appealing." Want to hear more about the NVIDIA and Adobe partnership? Check out our blog post and see a video of Farmville and Wired on Tegra-powered tablets! Optimus is an ‘Invisible Game Changer'Recently NVIDIA announced a new technology for notebooks called Optimus that optimizes the mobile experience by letting the user get the performance of discrete graphics from a notebook while still delivering great battery life. Optimus accomplishes this by automatically and seamlessly selecting the right graphics processor for the job between an NVIDIA discrete GPU or an Intel integrated GPU. Bright Side of News did an in depth look at the technology, and gave it the Bright Side of News Innovation Award. They also gave an Editor's Choice to the Optimus-enabled Asus UL50vf: "In the end, there is no other choice but to give two awards. Firstly, the technology that made all this possible. NVIDIA Optimus Technology is an invisible game changer." Trusted Reviews will tell you how it works. "Optimus delivers on all the things NVIDIA claims. When you launch any application deemed to require the discrete GPU, it is automatically turned on to give you the power you need. And unless you're using the testing tool we've been given which shows the status of the GPU, the whole process is invisible to the end user. There's no switch to flip, no screen flickering, just a seamless transition from one to the other - as it should." The Medion Akoya P6622 is a notebook with NVIDIA Optimus technology and a GeForce 310M GPU. Europe is going wild for it. PC Welt says: "With the new Medion Akoya P6622 an Aldi notebook once again is a trendsetter. The Akoya P6622 is one of the first notebooks to use the Optimus technology from NVIDIA." It performed as advertised for Chip: "As long as no high graphics performance is needed data is transmitted to the energy-efficient Intel GMA integrated HD graphics core. When more 3D performance is needed, Optimus automatically switches unnoticed by the user to the more powerful but also more power-hungry GeForce graphics. It makes a very convenient hybrid graphics solution that works without any problems in our tests." Your next notebook better have NVIDIA Optimus technology: "After all any laptop with a GPU and without Optimus is at a major disadvantage in terms of expected battery life which is a big factor in use. I don't want to make too much of it but it's another good datapoint with respect to NVIDIA maintaining the leadership in driving the GPU into the fabric of general purpose computing." 3D Vision is Best of the Year, AgainNVIDIA 3D Vision is a combination of wireless active shutter glasses and advanced software, which automatically transforms hundreds of PC games into full stereoscopic 3D. In addition, you can view movies and digital photographs in eye-popping 3D. Engadget readers and editors both say it is the Best Wearable Device of the Year, and gave it an award from each. Add it to the growing list of "end of year" awards for 3D Vision that includes Legit Reviews, IGN, Yahoo, BenchmarkReviews, iGizmo and others. Geeks Gone Wild: NVIDIA At PAX East 2010Wondering what to do for Spring Break? Tired of being cooped up after a nasty winter? Get your geek on and join us at PAX East 2010 as we unveil the next generation of PC gaming! At a special "Must See" presentation of our new GeForce GTX 400 Series in the main theater (Friday 3/26 from 6 PM to 7 PM only), come see NVIDIA unveil the next generation of PC gaming. Want to see what's hot and what's next? If you're even vaguely a fan of PC games and miss this special event, you'll likely be spending the next few months kicking yourself. Line up early as seating is limited. ‘Nuff said. And, for the true PC gamers (you know who you are) - you'll want to sign up for the GeForce LAN. This area features a 300-person Bring Your Own Computer area, plus a 400-station PC free-play/tournament area. For more information, and to find out details on how you can win your own trip to game on at PAX 2010, please visit: www.nvidia.com/paxeast GPU Computing Kills Bugs DeadGPU Computing is the use of the massively parallel architecture of the graphics processing unit (GPU) as a computational engine using high level languages and APIs. Found at TED, an awesome mosquito-killing demo aiming to eradicate malaria with femtosecond laser beams. They use lasers to recognize and track the insects, measure the frequency of the wingbeats to determine their gender. Females are then zapped to prevent them from breeding more mosquitoes. The GPU does the calculations needed. Due to the very nature of computer graphics, GPUs excel at doing many things at once and as such are ideally suited to this new computing environment. What GPU's bring is a massively parallel approach to the problem with 100's of cores. NVIDIA Quadro Pro Graphics Create Winter Wonderland for NBCIf you watched NBC's coverage of the Olympics these past two weeks, you probably saw Bode Miller flying down the mountain racing neck and neck against Ivica Kostelic in the Alpine Skiing Men's Downhill, and/or Lindsey Vonn and Andrea Fischerbacher chasing each other down the super-G course. If so, no, you weren't imagining it- you DID see two skiers racing down the mountain to the finish line at the same time, mere inches from one another. Yes, these are solo competitions, with each competitor racing against the clock, but an NVIDIA Quadro GPU-driven technology from Sportvision called SimulCam gives viewers the ability to instantly compare one skier's performance against another's, helping better explain why one skier just beat out another by mere tenths or even thousandths of a second. Or how about another intriguing NVIDIA Quadro GPU-driven video effect from Sportvision, called "StroMotion." This one repeatedly freezes athletes in motion during a given segment of their routine to demonstrate, within a single frame, the entire evolution of their movements. A still photo is one thing. But a StroMotion-enhanced video sequence effectively lets the viewer see into the mind of an athlete as they execute a routine. StroMotion technology enhanced coverage of the Moguls competition, along with several other events. The SimulCam technology involves "background recognition," a process that identifies the pixels that belong in the background and calculates how those pixels move throughout a series of successive images. Those calculations are made possible by leveraging the power of NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs). Differences in the camera angles between every two images of two videos are determined, and then every image of the second video is geometrically modified so as to match the viewpoint of the corresponding image in the first video. SimulCam then blends the two images together. StroMotion similarly utilizes the power of NVIDIA Quadro GPUs to compute the camera movement between every two successive video images. Once determined, it stitches the images together, and using a high level of redundancy, it's actually able to remove the moving object from the image. Then, from the computed camera movement, StroMotion can determine how each video image relates geometrically to each other and to the panorama. The identification of pixels belonging to moving objects is based on the change-detection of each video image within the corresponding area in the panorama. So no matter how you look at it, the power of the GPU continues to enhance the action you see on TV. Keep your eyes out for more cool VFX driven by NVIDIA Quadro technology in the future. |
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