NVIDIA nTeresting News: 30 April 30 2010

In this Issue:

• NVIDIA was the first GPU manufacturer to provide notebook drivers directly to consumers and we are taking another step forward by unifying our notebook and desktop drivers.
• NVIDIA continues to invest in the future of computing with $250,000 in research grants.
• The 3D Summit let NVIDIA showcase our 3D Vision stereoscopic 3D solution.
• Senior Vice President Dan Vivoli was on TV this week to talk about the growing importance of the GPU and NVIDIA's legal issues with Intel.
• GeForce GTX 400 cards are put to the test, and they chew through tessellation like nobody's business.
• GPU acceleration changes the way you work in Adobe Creative Suites 5.

Verde is Getting Unified

When customers needed new drivers in order to take full advantage of the latest visual computing applications on their laptops, NVIDIA became the first GPU manufacturer to provide them.

"By taking that important first step of supporting our customers with drivers for notebook GPUs, NVIDIA was able provide our customers with constant performance boosts, new features and fix bugs along the way. We now have a driver pulse of about once a month now, but we are not tied to a strict schedule. We believe the right time to release a new driver is when it is needed. If it is less than a month, great - more than a month, that's ok too."

We have been providing notebook drivers through our Verde program for a little over a year, and we are now are seeing over a million customers a month update with these drivers. They come for performance, they come for stability and they come for new features.

"Since then NVIDIA has added support for PhysX, added 300 SLI profiles and multi-monitor support, added support for ambient occlusion and OpenGL up to 3.2, Flash 10.1 acceleration, DirectCompute, OpenCL and more. And don't forget the performance increases that come with newer drivers; titles like HAWX, Fallout 3, World in Conflict and others have seen more than a 30% boost since that older release. Obviously these are features that we feel ALL gamers should have access to and we are glad that NVIDIA has started this trend with Verde."

Now they are getting support for 3D TVs with a simple software download.

"NVIDIA will also be releasing a feature called 3D TV Play which will allow notebook users to connect their systems to 3D TVs, to exploit the benefits of 3D Vision and 3D multimedia content using the glasses included with the TV."

In May, Verde takes another step forward by unifying desktop and notebook drivers. Going forward each driver release for Windows Vista and Windows 7 desktop PCs will go out with an equivalent Verde notebook driver. These Verde drivers will support all notebook platforms including Optimus notebooks.

Consumer demand for timely driver updates has outgrown the rate at which drivers are currently supplied to the market. Customers need new drivers in order to be able to take full advantage of the latest visual computing applications. Verde delivers them.

10 Brainiacs Receive NVIDIA Research Awards

NVIDIA continues to invest in computing research by awarding $250,000 to 10 top graduate students. The students will each receive $25,000 as well as technical support to research visual and parallel computing challenges.

You might be tempted to throw a blowout kegger with that kind of cash, but these are PhD students from places like UIUC, MIT, and Stanford. Their research will lead to advancements in science, computer vision, and light-transport simulation. Their work will help define the future of computing, so here's hoping they celebrate in moderation.

What is this 3D You Speak of?

Unless you have been living under a rock you may have noticed that 3D is hawt. Really hawt.

"You're seeing it now," said "Avatar" producer Jon Landau. "People are going to want 3-D in their homes. I think 3-D is going to become ubiquitous in everything we do. From what I understand of the initial TV sales at Best Buy, everything went out the door. Why? Because it's of a certain quality, and I think that's what we have to make sure we protect."

At the 3D summit this week, NVIDIA showcase 3D Vision. Games, movies and pictures in 3D are all the rage, and NVIDIA 3D Vision continues to prove itself as the leading hardware for 3D viewing.

"3-D gaming isn't just pie-in-the-sky talk. It's already here - if you've got the right equipment.

More than 400 current PC games, including Battlefield: Bad Company 2, World of Warcraft and Borderlands, can be played in stereoscopic 3-D if you've got the necessary specialized hardware, said Phil Eisler, NVIDIA's general manager of 3-D Vision."

Dano Meets The Press

NVIDIA Senior Vice President Dan Vivoli was on Press:Here TV show this week to talk about the growing importance of the GPU, our mobile Tegra processor and NVIDIA's legal issues with Intel.

"Instead of NVIDIA's high-tech GPU technology, purchasers of low-end laptops, notebooks and desktops are currently subject to Intel's lower-tech GPUs, and so being denied the ability to perform functions such as quick face-recognition searches through photos or video files."

To get the best experience with today's visual computing applications you need to make sure your PC has the right mix of CPU/GPU horsepower. Whether you're using the latest operating systems, viewing or editing photos, finding directions, playing a game, or watching a Blu-ray movie, a balanced PC with an NVIDIA GeForce GPU yields the best experience.

GeForce GTX 400 Series..mmmmm Tessellation

GeForce GTX 400 GPUs are designed from the ground up for tessellation, the most important feature of the new DirectX 11 API. With up to 8x the directed tessellation performance of the competition, the GTX 480 is a true tessellation monster.

"Then the GTX-4xx lineup eats Tessellation and ray tracing for breakfast and has the advantage in every benchmark and game using those technologies so for us it's not a hard call."

The new GTX 400 GPUs also support CUDA, PhysX, SLI, and 3D Vision Surround technologies, which combine to take PC gaming to new levels of immersiveness and interaction.

Got Adobe CS5? Get Quadro.

If you're a creative artist, designer, or video professional, you can accelerate your full post production workflow by unlocking the power of Adobe Creative Suite 5 software with NVIDIA GPUs.

"We didn't immediately see such dramatic improvements in Premiere Pro's ability to preview effects in real time. However, fitting our test PC with a suitable NVIDIA graphics card gave a dramatic boost to effects performance."

Adobe has redesigned their entire video rendering and playback engine to harness the power of NVIDIA GPUs. The result is a fluid, real-time editing experience for adding additional effects, multiple layers, or ultra high resolution content. No more wasting time waiting for things like Encoding and Exporting progress bars to slowly fill the box.

Benchmark Reviews has also tested tessellation with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Fermi Video Card