NVIDIA nTerresting News 23-July-2010

In this Issue:

• Got Adobe Premiere Pro? Get Quadro.
• NVIDIA was fashionably late to the multi-display party, but we did bring the best gift.
• StarCraft II is coming, and NVIDIA has the perfect GPU for it in the GeForce GTX 460.
• Optimus continues to roll, stealing headlines and winning awards for notebook OEMs.
• Visual Studio developers are wild about Parallel Nsight.

Premiere Pro CS5 Gets Tested

Film editing can be a time consuming process. That is where the Mercury Playback Engine steps in. Icrontic took a look at Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 using our beloved Quadro FX Pro graphics solution.

"As you can see, CS5 with the Mercury Playback Engine, GPU acceleration and native 64-bit software, combine to give you remarkable performance improvements in timeline playback and encoding. But, remove GPU acceleration and you have to wait for everything, including nearly 10 times as long for your h.264 encode to complete."

In the movie biz, time is money....and GPU computing is soooooo money.

GPU 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. This all sounds good, but is GPU computing really a big deal?

"GPU computing is a freight train running towards our computers at breakneck speeds. It brings wonderful potential in future applications and computer performance. Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Mercury Playback Engine serve as a testament to the technology's bright future, and it is only the tip of the iceberg of what we can expect."

With GPU computing, the sequential part of the application runs on the CPU and the computationally-intensive part runs on the GPU. From the user's perspective, the application just runs faster because it is using the high-performance of the GPU to boost performance.

Multi-Display Computing has a New Leader

NVIDIA has a lot of firsts. We are first with GPU computing. We are first with GPU accelerated physics. We are first with 3D. So a lot of people saw it as a big deal when AMD implemented Eyefinity for the consumer market and we had no answer. We took their feedback to heart and went to work.

If you can't be first, you might as well be best. So we made our multi-display technology faster than theirs, gave consumers more antialiasing options, made it compatible with existing GPUs, did it without special connectors and did it in 3D.

"If you just want the best performing multi-display gaming experience you can buy with the highest level of image quality, nothing surpasses GeForce GTX 480 SLIwith NV Surround. (Except quite possibly 3-Way SLI!) GTX 480 SLI is going to give you the highest framerates and allow you to enable more in-game graphical features and antialiasing levels.

And it was just last week that HardOCP was imbibing us with alcohol after having a great experience with 2 year-old GPUs.

"NVIDIA's NV Surround is bringing multi-display gaming to the masses and its customer base from years ago. NVIDIA deserves a pat on the back and a cold beer for doing the right thing for the gaming and hardware communitiesand allowing those groups to experience this technology without having to purchase a shiny new $500 video card."

When you buy an NVIDIA GPU you get more than just great frame rates, you get ‘graphics plus'. ‘Graphics plus' means you get other cool stuff, too. Examples include CUDA for GPU computing, PhysX for GPU accelerated physics, 3D Vision for stereoscopic 3D.....and NVIDIA Surround Technology. 3D Vision Surround let's you span games across three monitors in full 3D for an incredibly immersive gaming experience. 3D Vision Surround is available for both GTX 400 Series and GTX 200 Series GPUs.

Asus released a monitor with 3D Vision support just this week, and it is already an award winner.

"Asus has an extremely solid product here and enthusiasts looking to make the move towards 3D computing should definitely take note. Bottom line is that If you're ready to take the dive into stereoscopic technology, you should put the Asus VG236H at the top of your upgrade wish list."

You can learn more about 3D Vision or 3D Vision Surround on the Engadget podcast.

Ready or Not, StarCraft II is Coming....

StarCraft II is one of the most highly anticipated titles, well....ever. Thanks to having a kick ass developer relations department, NVIDIA is working with them to make sure that GeForce GPUs provide the best experience. When you do that, you give your customers something the competition does not.

"All the video cards tested produce more than acceptable frame rates at both resolutions; the ATI versions could only be ran using in game settings. The NVIDIA versions via the NVIDIA control panel have the ability to force Antialiasing (AA) and Ansitropic Filtering (AF), being able to manipulate AA and AF increases "Eyecandy" which smoothes, enhances image quality and filters the overlay of the video being rendered."

But if you need a new GPU, the one to buy is clear:

"This actually leads us to our recommendation: the GTX 460 1GB. It offers the perfect balance of overall performance, power consumption and price. Even if Blizzard rolls out a number of patches which add increased image quality, this card still has the overhead necessary to continue delivering performance in spades long into the update life of StarCraft II. It also has the ability to use NVIDIA's anti aliasing override in order to give the game that extra eye candy punch versus the competition. As we said in its original review: the GTX 460 1GB is literally the perfect card for today's market and its performance in StarCraft II just shows this once again."

Is the GeForce GTX 460 really that good?

"There one heck of a lot of bang for the buck in NVIDIA's $199 to $229 F104-based AIBs: good gaming scores, good overall capabilities, modest power consumption, and quiet running. The AIBs can be ganged up in SLI mode (but they have to be of the same memory size) for additional performance. Showing its Starfighter qualities, the F104-based GTX 460 0.8GM board scored on average 21% higher FPS than the Radeon 5830, and the GTX 460 1GB was 32.6% and that's damn impressive."

Tailor made to hit the gamers' sweet spot, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 delivers revolutionary levels of price/performance...and better image quality in StarCraft II.

Optimus is Still Freakin' Awesome

Optimus is a slam dunk, headline stealing, award-winning technology that is quickly becoming the must-have feature for your notebook. This week, the hot reviews keep coming:

"With Optimus, we have the flexibility of efficiency and multimedia power when needed - all without having to carry around a larger, heavier, and more expensive 9-cell battery."

"Though the processor isn't best of breed and the keyboard is cramped, Alienware channeled its resources into the one part that mattered most to gamers-a powerful NVIDIA chip (now powered by Optimus)."

"Granted, the new Core i7 configuration doesn't offer that much more performance than the old M11x with overclocked Intel Pentium Dual Core SU4100, but the better processor and NVIDIA Optimus provide two more reasons to buy the Alienware M11x R2 if you didn't already buy the original M11x."

"The Alienware M11x is pure fun: It looks good, has a pleasant feel and, thanks to Core i5, dedicated NVIDIA GPU and 256-gigabyte SSD an excellent level of performance for this segment. The built-in battery and the smart Optimus technology ensure that the M11x still runs for a long time."

NVIDIA Optimus is a must-have technology for notebooks 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.

Parallel Nsight Released to the Wild
In January of this year, we released a beta of Parallel Nsight and since then, more than 8000 beta developers have been testing it and giving us feedback. With their help, we released this week, Parallel Nsight 1.0 Standard - the first production release of our development environment for GPU-accelerated applications that work with Microsoft Visual Studio. Designed with features for both compute and graphics developers, Parallel Nsight has the market excited.

Anton Kaplanyan, lead researcher at CryTek had this to say:

"Parallel Nsight is the first toolbox in the world that allows us to look under the hood of the GPU, and makes parallel debugging not only possible but pleasant, significantly accelerating DirectX 11 development."

George Tang, vice president and general manager of the Video and Home entertainment group at ArcSoft said,

"NVIDIA Parallel Nsight has become our daily development tool when working with our CUDA-based applications such as SimHD and H.264 encoder."

No other company provides the range of developer tools for general purpose programming on GPUs than NVIDIA. NVIDIA GPUs are the only language/API agnostic GPUs available today, with support for C/C++, OpenCL, DirectCompute, Fortran and other standards. NVIDIA has also recently released CUDA 3.1, the latest update to its CUDA SDK.

Parallel Nsight 1.0 Standard is available to all Visual Studio developers, free of charge, here.