| NVIDIA nTerresting Newsletter: 15 October 2010 |
| Written by NVIDIA - Brian Burke | ||
| Monday, 18 October 2010 | ||
NVIDIA nTerresting Newsletter: 15 October 2010In this Issue:
Quadro Makes Young Girls Swoon The only thing that will make a young girl swoon faster than a Twilight film would be more Twilight films faster. That is exactly what NVIDIA enabled Tippet Studio to do. Tippett Studio recently upgraded over 200 of their artist workstations to NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions, enabling them to work up to five times faster. So what? So Tippett Studio worked on the Twilight Saga, that's what. "Making the transition from GeForce to Quadro has had a huge impact," said Tippett CTO, Sanjay Das, "Not only on existing project work, but also in looking toward the future as we explore GPU accelerated rendering and the options presented by the outcropping of new high-end VFX tools that take advantage of Quadro GPUs."
Look for more Quadro rendered graphics from Tippett Studios in Priest, The Smurfs, Immortals, and Hemingway & Gellhorn.
Now for the important stuff: Team Edward or Team Jacob..who you got?
MIT: CPUs Have Hit the Wall(s) MIT says CPUs aren't getting any faster. "In fact, the next-generation of CPUs, including Intel's forthcoming Sandy Bridge processor, have to contend with multiple walls--a memory bottleneck (the bandwidth of the channel between the CPU and a computer's memory); the instruction level parallelism (ILP) wall (the availability of enough discrete parallel instructions for a multi-core chip) and the power wall (the chip's overall temperature and power consumption)."
CPUs are no longer increasing in clock speed, yet we are demanding more from our 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 - i.e.: 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 100s of cores.
GeForce GT 430 is Here, So is 260.89 BETA Driver On Monday NVIDIA released the GeForce GT 430, specifically designed to power today's cutting-edge digital media PCs, providing a great experience for photo and video editing, Blu-ray 3D, mainstream gaming, and the next generation of GPU-accelerated Web browsers. It only costs $79.
To support it, we released the 260.89 BETA driver and suddenly stuff got faster. Which stuff?
GTC Recap Want to know what went on at GTC recently? Anandtech has a good breakdown. "Today we're wrapping up our coverage of last month's NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, including the show's exhibit hall. We came to GTC to get a better grasp on just where things are for NVIDIA's still-fledging GPU compute efforts along with the wider industry as a whole, and we didn't leave disappointed. Besides seeing some interesting demos - including the closest thing you'll see to a holodeck in 2010 - we had a chance to talk to Adobe, Microsoft, Cyberlink, and others about where they see GPU computing going in the next couple of years."
GPGPU: HPC and Beyond The GPU is taking over the high performance computing space. "Beyond straight HPC, GPU computing is now being employed in everything from computer vision to business intelligence. Like the CPU, the GPU is now in that territory where developers are adapting to the chip, rather than the other way around."
GPU Computing has a clear leader. "The reason for that is simple: general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing has become a technology disrupter in HPC, and NVIDIA is the company driving it."
COD: Black Ops = Record Preorders Hot on the heels of the news that Call of Duty: Black Ops has added support for 3D Vision comes news that they have recorded record preorders. "Retailer GameStop has confirmed that it has received a record number of pre-orders for Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops, which releases worldwide on November 9th. The news puts the game on-track to beat the industry records set by last year's installment in the series Modern Warfare 2 - putting it on track to achieve the lofty goals set by Treyarch's Josh Olin when speaking to MCV in May."
A Rose By Any Other Name Asus is a great partner for NVIDIA. This week they released a monitor that is compatible with NVIDIA 3D Vision technology. "Packaging the ASUS VG236H monitor with a NVIDIA 3D Vision home kit was a brilliant decision, and ensures that the best possible experience is delivered on a 3D Vision Ready device."
Their Asus U45Jc-A1 laptop continues to get nearly perfect scores from reviewers. "But overall performance is where it truly shines, thanks to NVIDIA's (Optimus) switchable graphics technology and unprecedented battery scores in the mainstream category."
Meanwhile their Asus G73 JW-A1 laptop continued its award-winning ways. "The key feature with this notebook is the new NVIDIA GPU, which is excellent for multimedia use and works well for gaming as well."
But my favorite Asus release this week was this funny video commenting on the fact that (like NVIDIA) Asus has a name that is often mispronounced. But Asus has won PC Magazine's Readers Choice Award for Service & Reliability two years in a row, so you will know how to pronounce it soon enough. "Once again, Asus receives the highest overall rating among Windows laptop makers."
3D has a Clear Leader, Too NVIDIA is a technology leader. Like HPCwire said above, we are ahead in GPU Computing. "The reason for that is simple: general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing has become a technology disrupter in HPC, and NVIDIA is the company driving it."
We are ahead of the competition in GPU physics. "During the Keynote Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President Content and Technology in NVIDIA showed off two amazing physics based demos that use PhysX to simulate smoke and fluids(water). We have seen smoke and fluid simulation for a long time now but these new demos are really amazing and continue to improve and are all done in real time on a single GPU."
3D Vision continues to be praised by press as the best implementation of 3D on the PC platform. "Gamer interested in 3D special effects have only a few options to select from, but it seems that NVIDIA's 3D Vision technology is currently the most effective."
AMD is currently playing catch-up in 3D, and their first attempt leaves a lot to be desired. "The Y560D uses a program suite called TriDef. TriDef can play 3D content (the system contains a preloaded selection of 3D shorts) and can theoretically render 2D games in a 3D mode. We say theoretically because while we can confirm the program will *attempt* to perform this process, we never saw it do so successfully for any length of time. The games we tested (WoW and Half Life 2) would boot, briefly run in 3D mode, then crash. Frame rates were fine and the 3D effect was visible, but the TriDef converter mysteriously scrambled keyboard input in WoW while Half Life 2 Episode 2 wasn't stable."
3D Vision has an ecosystem. Interest in 3D Vision and 3D content is strong and growing. 3D Vision unit sales are in the hundreds of thousands and will grow with the continued introduction of new 3D platforms. Some 30 million 3D PCs are expected by 2012. Already, six of the 10 largest monitor makers are shipping 3D displays; and Asus, Toshiba, Clevo and Acer are shipping 3D notebooks. Streaming web content, such as 3D Vision Live, and sporting events, like the US Open Tennis Finals, are happening. There are 3D cameras and projectors supported, and Blu-ray 3D players from Cyberlink and Arcsoft. And over 425 games are supported with 3D Vision technology. Related Articles:
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