| NVIDIA nTerresting News: 13 August 2010 |
| Written by NVIDIA - Brian Burke | ||
| Saturday, 14 August 2010 | ||
NVIDIA nTerresting News: 13 August 2010In this issue:
SLI > Crossfire When you are looking at multi-GPU set-ups, two things becoming critically important: Driver updates and scaling. A pair of influential sites set out to see if SLI is still the king, or if Crossfire was able to unseat the reigning champ. HardOCP tested the GeForce GTX 460 and was impressed, so much so that they took two of them ($460) and matched them up against the AMD Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire set-up ($720). So what does the extra $260 you spend on a AMD set-up get you: "GeForce GTX 460 1GB SLI real world gaming performance is superior to even AMD's fastest high-end single GPU video cards in a CrossFireX configuration." No way, surely that has to be some kind of a mistake? Not according to Tech Report. "The story here, it seems to me, is the strong showing from the GeForce side of the house. When a GeForce GTX 460 1GB is faster than a Radeon HD 5870, you can probably expect that two GTX 460s will be faster than two 5870s. And that's just what happens." Well, let's look at the two main concerns for multi-GPU set-ups: scaling? "AMD should be worried about this. CrossFireX scaling needs some work....a lot of work. SLI is blowing CrossFireX out of the water with these newer GPUs. Driver Updates? "These days, NVIDIA often adds support for new games to its drivers weeks before the game itself ships to consumers." So SLI offers more value, better scaling and superior driver updates. GeForce GPUs are faster. GeForce GPUs have GPU computing. They offer great in game physics, better multi monitor support, and stereoscopic 3D--which even works on three monitors. GeForce and SLI, FTW! Mafia II Demo is out, GeForce is it! Mafia II is being touted as a showcase title for GeForce and ‘graphics plus'. Now GeForce owners can get a taste of the life of a Don in the demo. Mafia II makes it real with PhysX. Tear up Empire Bay with your machine gun, and experience the mass destruction and particle effects as glass shatters, wood splinters, cars explode, and buildings crumble. "What I failed to say is that the game left me speechless when it comes to PhysX." PhysX is ‘graphics plus'. "As far as I'm aware, NVIDIA is really the only company that's putting such a focus on it, and it must be appealing to some, because I have personal friends who continue to go for GeForce cards with PhysX being one of the major draws." PhysX isn't the only goodness for GeForce gamers in Mafia II. 2k Games has also added support for NVIDIA 3D Vision and NVIDIA Surround technologies. "The combination of 3D with graphics details mentioned previously provides a quality and realism never seen before in a 3D game."
Mafia II is winning over converts. "I was never a big supporter of the 3D movement going on right now in the video games industry. While I do like it in movies where it increases the sense of immersion, I have always figured that entertainment software is pretty well situated in this area for the quite expensive investment in a 3D TV or monitor and the corresponding hardware to be worth it. That was until I played the Mafia II demo in 3D using NVIDIA 3D Vision today. The title is clearly built with three-dimensional gaming in mind from the ground up and its really apparent from the first seconds with Vito standing around in his house...."
Kudos to 2k for using ‘graphics plus' to make the PC version of Mafia II something special. "However, not every developer takes the time to ensure that the PC version of their game will be this superior to its console counterparts, so I have to hand it to 2k games once again for making me proud to be a PC gamer." Play Mafia II on a Radeon GPU? Fugetaboutit! Uncle Sam Wants GPU Computing Earlier this week it was announced that a team led by NVIDIA was awarded a research grant of $25 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm, to address what the agency calls a "crisis in computing." "If all goes according to plan - and these are ambitious plans, to be sure - the U.S. will one day soon be able to use one big, honking computer. Make that an "exascale supercomputer," in the terms of the trade. The DARPA-ed program is designed find a way to overcome the limits of Moore's Law, postulated by Intel's co-founder Gordon Moore, which predicted that the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit essentially doubles every couple of years." The four-year research contract, awarded under DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC ) program, covers work to develop the GPU technologies required to build the new class of exascale supercomputers which will be 1,000-times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers. The team includes Cray Inc., Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and six top U.S. universities. "It's even more interesting that NVIDIA is now garnering this kind of respect from the HPC research community. As recently as five years ago, no one would have though the GPU maker would be at the cutting-edge of supercomputing."
GPU Computing is the use of the massively parallel architecture of the graphics processing unit (GPU) as a computational engine using industry standard languages and APIs. CPUs are no longer increasing in clock speed, yet users are demanding more from their PCs today than ever before. In order to provide the much needed performance to deliver on these expectations, the only path available is to go multi-core or parallel - ie: add more cores and split demanding workloads across them. 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 GPUs bring is a massively parallel approach to the problem with 100's of cores. Crysis 2 Gameplay...WOW! This video of Crysis 2 gameplay speaks for itself. It is stunning! Benchmark Reviews offers several GeForce GTX 460 articles in our Featured Reviews: Video Cards section. |
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