Acer Revo and NVIDIA Ion Hands On: Flawless Blu-ray Playback Changes Cheap Computers Forever

Netbooks Still Aren't Quite Ready for HD

"But it's just. Not. Quite. There. Yet. And it pains me so to make that personal revelation."

""In closing, don't buy the hype around NVIDIA Ion—it offers no advantages that an Intel platform cannot provide relevant to the Netbook and Nettop market segments. The company also claims that the forthcoming introduction of its new netbook and nettop platforms at the end of this year will mean that the window of opportunity for ION is very short."

Conclusion: NVIDIA ION delivers as advertised. Intel GN40 does not.

Folding Farmers Do it with GeForce

46 GPUs. 23 graphics cards. All to fight back. MaximumPC has a story about a folding PC that is packed with power. It was created by Jason Farqué, whose father suffers from Huntington's Disease.

"The reason that my father in enrolled in [a clinical trial] is the same as the reason I run my folding farm. To fight back, to do something," Farqué wrote on his blog. "To help science overcoming Huntington's Disease so that people as yet unborn won't have as hard a time as he and others do. Because my father wants the human race to succeed, to get better, to overcome our bodies' inherent frailties by using our minds."

GPU Computing for the Consumer

Since its introduction in 2006, CUDA has been a technology that has driven ridiculously high application speed-ups for oil and gas exploration, product design, medical imaging, scientific research and other commercial applications in the HPC arena. It saves companies millions of dollars and allows them to be more productive, now. It is now finding its way into mainstream applications.

Badaboom is still getting good reviews. Super LoiloScope, SimHD and vReveal, have all been introduced this month. And on April 20th, Nero will join the fray with "Move It".

"With more and more applications adopting the power of the GPU to speed up computing, both NVIDIA and AMD have strong potential for additional GPU market growth. And even though we at PC Perspective have been harping on the power and need for a cross-platform programming initiative like OpenCL, it's hard to argue that CUDA has given NVIDIA's GPUs a good sized head start."

At GDC 09, NVIDIA demonstrated examples written in both in their C language programming environment as well as upcoming APIs, OpenCL and DirectX Compute. OpenCL was developed on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA was the first to demonstrate an OpenCL app running on a GPU at Siggraph Asia in December.

GeForce GTX 260M Gets It Done

Laptop Magazine has published the first review of a laptop that features the GeForce GTX 260M notebook GPU. They praised the performance of the GeForce GTX 260M:

"The ability to provide a heart-pumping game experience is more important than scores on paper, however, and the Sager NP8662 was able to slice through the latest titles like a rail-gun through zombie flesh. We were able to cruise through Call of Duty: WaW, CoD 4, and L4D without any trouble and with all of the graphics turned to high."

"Thanks to the system's NVIDIA CUDA support, you can off-load some of the CPU processing to the graphics processing unit with software like Badaboom, which is specifically designed for CUDA-enabled systems to encode video quicker. Using Badaboom, we transcoded the same 114MB AVI file into an MP4 format in just 1:19." (Note: compared to 6:24, 7:54 and 10:28 on other systems.)

Top CEO Gives Free Advice

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was named a top executive by the users of the glassdoor.com. Why is that good? Because Glass door encourages company employees to dish about job salaries, corporate culture and so forth. If you are interested in how he created NVIDIA, you can hear him dish on Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner web site.

Learn to Program in CUDA

Electronic Design published an article on "Programming the CUDA Architecture" in their April 9th print issue. Why should you learn it?

"GPUs are quickly surpassing CPUs in computation speed. Now programmers can use the CUDA architecture to help simplify their implementation."

GeForce 275 GTX is Winning

GeForce GTX 275 reviews are continuing to roll in. To quantify the results of GeForce GTX 275 wins over Radeon HD 4890, NVIDIA tallied wins vs. losses in over 1,000 benchmarks runs across 37 worldwide press reviews. The results are clear as the GeForce GTX 275 beats HD 4890 in over 68% of the benchmarks! Beyond the clear graphics performance leadership, press reviews also substantiate that GTX 275 delivers:

• Outstanding GPU physics acceleration
• Unparalleled Compute Support with CUDA
• A quiet gaming experience
• Impressive overclockability

Quadro Keeps Winning

The new top-to-bottom Quadro line-up is making waves. 3D Professor awarded the new Quadro FX 3800 with an Editor's Choice Award.

"Ultimately with the initial impressions demonstrated; it would appear that the NVIDIA Quadro FX3800 is a resourceful professional high-end card that competes in all sectors. Therefore giving the end users from all walks of life within the professional graphics industry many optional upgrades without having to break the bank."

• Switched to .NET 3.5
• Using the now officially documented NVAPI to detect nVidia cards, the installed driver and the current SLI configuration
• Added an elaborate new "Show GPU info" function
• Added Ambient Occlusion options
• Adapted SLI Anti-Aliasing options to the current driver
• Replaced the deprecated "Forceware" name with "GeForce driver" throughout the project
• Removed the support for all drivers older than 185.x
• Added new icons from Michael Wenz
• Updated all AntiAliasing compatibility flags descriptions to the current driver (185.68)
• Removed handling for pre-G80 cards. All cards are now treated the same
• Removed workaround for the driver's incorrect handling of the "OpenGL driver extension limit" setting since the current driver does this correctly now
• Bugfix: OpenGL games are now also affected when VSync is forced through nHancer (bug has been in nHancer since its inception)
• Improved auto-import of profiles after a new driver has been installed, which fixes the reoccurring appearance of the auto-import window after nHancer's is started

Why the NVIDIA GPU Matters for Adobe Photoshop CS4

Adobe Photoshop CS4 and NVIDIA GPUs

Adobe Premiere Pro and NVIDIA Quadro GPUs

Adobe After Effects and NVIDIA Quadro GPUs

Adobe and NVIDIA - Kevan OBrien, Video Solutions Expert, Adobe

NVIDIA and Adobe - Jeff Brown, GM Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA

The first PC to feature an Intel Atom processor and an NVIDIA ION GPU has hit the market.

"Acer Revo and NVIDIA ION Hands-on: flawless blu-ray playback changes cheap computers forever"

"...may be one of the best desktop computers ever created."

"Acer decided to launch it as the AspireRevo, basically providing the world with a revolutionary product that offers an impressive level of performance inside a small package."

"The AspireRevo is actually a very stylish little machine. Let's salivate, shall we? Bookshelf HTPC? It certainly does smack of that and if you tether a USB Blu-ray drive to it, you've got all the comforts of home in very little space."

"Any company not at least seriously considering adopting an ION platform design has no desire to be on the forefront of PC technology."

Tegra Splashes Down at CTIA

NVIDIA was at CTIA showing off a prototype of an NVIDIA Tegra Powered netbook. They took an HP Mini 1000 and replaced the Intel Atom with and NVIDIA Tegra. Laptop played with it.

"So far we like what we see from Tegra in terms of its 1080p video support and Flash chops, and we can’t wait to see which netbook vendors adopt the platform for running Windows CE and Android (further down the line)."

"...and like other Tegra devices we've seen, this thing could easily have HDMI, run fluid 3D graphics, and generally make the world a better place at a stupid cheap price."

Intel's Anti-GeForce 9400M Propaganda=FAIL

On Tuesday Fudzilla posted a story about a slide deck that Intel was using to disparage the GeForce 9400M with some bad data.

"It definitely sounds that Intel is concerned and someone finally realized that Intel chipsets are inferior to NVIDIA's and ATI as people nowadays want to play some games on their laptop and for Intel this is something that company doesn't offer today, in mid-2009."

The following day, NVIDIA gave their take.

"NVIDIA mostly agrees with our comments in the story but at the same time, it underlines that the comparison that Intel did was quite misleading."

"In the end, we recommend a GeForce 9400 mGPU platform if you're not sure what to use, if you get a better deal than on a G45 motherboard, or if you are into video and gaming. In these segments, the NVIDIA platform is superior to Intel's offering."

The Magic Button

vReveal from MotionDSP is like a magic button that cleans up cruddy videos. It runs a lot faster on CUDA-enabled GPUs. Gaming Nexus took it for a spin.

"The second one I tested on was also taken with my HTC Touch Pro cell phone and features a lot of jittering as I played with my son. With this video I increased some of the items such as sharpness, stabilization, and how well it cleans the video. Here CUDA saved even more time with an estimated 12 minutes saving and the process finished in 3 minutes and 5 seconds. And as you can see from the result, the picture is a lot easier to view."

"Even though we have the use of a Core-i7 965 CPU the processor usage is still in the high 80's and the preview framerate never rises above 7FPS. Enabling CUDA on the GTX 275 doubles the framerate and drops CPU usage to an excellent 11%."

CUDA 2.2 is Here

NVIDIA announced an industry milestone for GPU Computing. With CUDA 2.2 beta they are including the industry's first GPU hardware and their Visual Profiler ver. 2.2 to the developer community. These critical development tools and rapid feature releases which their software team is driving out to the market underline NVIDIA as the leader in GPU Computing.

The CUDA architecture continues to blaze a trail as the leading platform for developing and running GPU Computing applications, with support for C, OpenCL, DirectX Compute, Fortran and other languages and APIs. The latest CUDA 2.2 beta contains a host of significant new features.

Ultimate Adobe CS4 Machine

PC Magazine ran a how-to article on building the ultimate Adobe CS4 machine. At the heart of this system is the NVIDIA Quadro CX GPU.

"For the all-important graphics processing, I swung for the fences and installed the Nvidia Quadro CX. But to the heavy CS4 user, the Quadro CX is worth every penny—it acts as a finely tuned accelerator for Photoshop and Premiere."

Harvard is CUDArific

Harvard joins Taiwan University, University of Utah, and UIUC as the company's latest CUDA Center of Excellence. CUDA is a suite of tools, including a c-compiler and SDK, for developing multi-core and parallel processing applications on NVIDIA's GPUs. Forty-one universities are currently using CUDA for multi-core and parallel processing programming, which is about double the number of universities that were using it seven months ago.

Graphics Plus Power Pack 3

The free download is equipped with the following five tailor-made tools and demos designed to showcase the benefit of CUDA acceleration on any GeForce 8, 9 or GTX-200 series graphics card.

• Star Tales – Benchmark Demo (New Social Networking Game featuring GPU accelerated Physics)
• Sacred 2: Fallen Angel - PhysX Game Patch (Note: Must have full version of Sacred 2: Fallen Angel)
• PhysX Screensaver (The full source code is now available from the The Game Creators)
• Motion DSP's vReveal – Try-and-Buy Demo (Video enhancement software for Windows)
• SETI@home (Search for extra-terrestrial intelligence with GeForce!)

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Legit Reviews has a story up about the differences you get when running on NVIDIA and ATI GPUs. The story centers around objects missing from the scene when rendered on ATI GPUs.

"Call me silly, but I don't see an improved visual experience in the screen shots pictured above as an object is actually missing from the game. If you didn't know any better you would think that the mesh cover wasn't supposed to be there, however it should be. It might be silly to you, but I want my mesh cover damn it!"

• Windows Vista Home Premium
• Outstanding 1080p HD video with true-fidelity 7.1 audio
• DirectX 10 graphics with advanced digital display connectivity
• Accelerated video enhancement and transcoding using NVIDIA CUDA technology

Although availability and pricing have yet to be determined, I've read estimates ranging from $300-$500. The ION platform looks to re-energize the PC industry and I personally can't wait to get my hands on one!

Developers React to NVIDIA ION

DirectX Compute Particles Demo Running on NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPU

DirectX Compute N Body Demo Running on NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPU

Instinct Technology Demo Using NVIDIA CUDA

This is a reasonably major update given the last time the Companions were revised was over 6 months ago. The most significant change is the Internet Explorer chapter which has been completely updated for Internet Explorer 8, however there are a range of other changes as well. Note that although a Windows 7 version of the TGTC is not yet out - and hopefully will be released if I am able to devote the time to it - for now Windows 7 users can utilize the TGTC for Vista as most of it applies to Windows 7 as well.

• mwave


• Newegg

What better way to celebrate the 10th anniversary of NVIDIA's Quadro line of GPUs than by overhauling the line with 7 new solutions that start at under $100.

"NVIDIA has given its line of Quadro FX workstation-class graphics cards a complete overhaul, launching six new boards ranging from the affordable entry-level Quadro FX 380 to the first model with 4GB of graphics RAM, the Quadro FX 5800."

NVIDIA also announced SLI Multi-OS, which allows customers and visualization applications, for the first time, to take full advantage of multiple NVIDIA Quadro GPUs from a single graphics workstation in a virtualized environment. This new technology delivers a faster, more efficient workflow to maximize productivity and lower the total cost of ownership for professionals in markets such as: digital content creation, sciences, manufacturing, and oil and gas.

If you use adobe Creative Suites 4, the Quadro CX is the card for you.

"With NVIDIA Quadro CX you'll get a powerful tool for video encoding using all capabilities of NVIDIA CUDA technology - a RapiHD Accelerator. With NVIDIA Quadro CX you`ll get a high-performance graphics accelerator for 3D graphics and animation. Maya, 3ds Max, Softimage - all of these apps do their's best with this GPU. Also you can calculate physics and create animation of dynamics using the GPU and PhysX module."

The GeForce GTX 275 hit this past week and reviews name it the new price/performance champ for $249.

"Indeed, if this card does fall into the $250USD price bracket it will simply be the best bang for your buck available."

"It looks like NVIDIA brought a gun to a knife fight. The GTX 275 just outperformed the HD 4890 at every turn...Pretty much a big win for the GTX 275."

"GeForce GTX 275 has a good price/performance relationship and is faster than the competitor [HD4890]"

"...more and more games support PhysX technology, CUDA is also used in more and more applications and therefore it becomes more and more interesting for the consumer."

"We'd give the nod, just, to the GeForce GTX 275, because it matches the Radeon HD 4890 on price and performance, is a little quieter, draws a touch less power when idling, and is backed up by more-robust GPGPU environment."

Intel wants Netbooks to be crippled computers and is pushing that concept very hard. Some say it's because they want to protect their high margins and to continue to sell consumers more processing power than they really need.

"The netbook phenomenon has opened consumers' eyes to the reality that they've long been buying far more CPU processing muscle than most of them require (excluding serious gamers, videographers and the like, of course). Eyes, once opened, are rarely coaxed into closing again, no matter how persuasive the pitch."

"When these things are sold, they need clear warning labels about what they won't be able to do, said Sean M. Maloney, the chief sales and marketing officer at Intel. It would be good to wait and play with one of these products before the industry gets carried away."

But the popularity of Netbooks is on the rise and it may be bad for some in the industry.

"However, we believe the impact would be especially negative for Intel and Microsoft, who today enjoy near monopoly positions in their respective markets."

A. M. Sacconaghi, a securities analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company

"Customers have told us they expect a full Windows experience across a variety of PC designs. What many people call a 'netbook' today is really a small notebook, and users expect it to perform like one. With NVIDIA's ION platform combined with Windows Vista Home Premium, consumers can get an affordable, premium Windows experience in a small notebook or desktop form factor. From browsing the web and checking email to streaming music or watching movies, it's an excellent solution for everyday computing."

Mike Ybarra, general manager for the Windows division at Microsoft

No, NVIDIA Is Not Buying VIA

That was a bad April Fool's joke. Wonder how much money was wasted Wednesday on people chasing, posting and correcting fake news stories?

UK Researchers Turn To Telsa And CUDA For 10x Jump

Daresbury Laboratories, one of the UK's most prestigious publically funded research institutes, has announced its new computing cluster will incorporate NVIDIA Tesla and CUDA technology. The mission of Daresbury Labs is to make it possible for a broad range of scientists to do the highest quality research tackling some of the most fundamental scientific questions. The new cluster will use GPU computing to facilitate this goal - early tests have already achieved 10-fold speed-ups in key libraries.

Michael Miller Sees Value of GPU Computing

Micheal Miller, who was editor-in-chief at PC Magazine from 1991-2005, has had two recent blog posts on GPU computing. His first was a nice overview of the state of GPU computing today.

"I love the concept. For a lot of things, today's computers are quite fast. But for other operations - complex calculations, video encoding, changing file types, applying Photoshop filters, etc. - you just seem to sit there waiting for the computer to finish. That's why the theory sounds so good. But for most of us, this has remained mostly a theory: there haven't been many consumer products that adopted the technology. Now GPU computing may be coming into its own, with the first real consumer-ready applications coming out."

"I got even better improvements when taking the same MPEG-2 file and creating an AVCHD 720 by 480p (creating a video stream at 6 Mbps and an audio stream at 256 Kbps). This took PowerDirector 13 minutes 24 seconds without GPU acceleration and only 4 minutes 19 seconds with GPU acceleration. In other words it was more than 3 times faster."

Arcsoft is shipping SimHD, a plug-in for ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre high-definition multimedia player. SimHD simply brings most standard-definition video to near high-definition quality by utilizing the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture to solve complex calculations in a fraction of the time required on a CPU. TG Daily likes it.

"To put it mildly, the power of parallel computing is amazing. And this type of software realization and real-world application of it is very exciting to see. Engines like CUDA and OpenCL, which expose compute abilities in easy-to-wield forms, abstracting away hardware considerations and allowing the developer to deal in data concepts, will change the way many of our devices operate in the years to me.

The Chinese government gave Dr. Hugo de Garis a couple million dollars to start a large-scale artificial intelligence project to build an artificial human brain. His current direction is attempting to scale from "several" parallel neural nets to many thousands of neural nets to drive human-like behaviors in soccer robots. At the AGI '08 conference, Hugo was talking about possibly using FPGA's, or some specialized hardware, but now (AGI '09) it looks like he's very excited about using NVIDIA GPUs to drive the computations needed by thousands of neural nets.

"This PC supercomputer contain 960 processors, all working in parallel, at a total speed of 4 teraflops, at the remarkable price of only $10,000, a PC revolution! It takes about 30 minutes to evolve one Parcone module on a PC. We therefore hope using the Tesla, that we can do the same in about one second, i.e. real time evolution."

In some cases, Intel integrated graphics are even unable to properly render DirectX and OpenGL applications. Please Intel, stop saying you have the best integrated graphics chipsets. Any casual, mainstream or hard-core gamer knows that they pretty much stink when compared to solutions offered by AMD and NVIDIA. Maybe things will change in 2013, but for now, you're in last place.

Intel: Our graphics silicon is gaining in gaming

Mercury Research showed that in 2008, for the first time, integrated graphics chipsets outsold discrete (graphics chips), and in 2013, we expect to see integrated graphics chipsets outsell discrete by three to one," Davies said.

"Intel's integrated graphics just don't work. I don't think they will ever work."

"All the Intel integrated graphics are still incapable of running any modern games. So you really have to buy a PC knowing that you're going to play games in order to avoid being stuck with integrated graphics. This is unfortunate, and this is one of main reasons behind the decline of the PC as a gaming platform. That really has endangered high-end PC game sales. In the past, if you bought a game, it would at least work. It might not have been a great experience, but it would always work."

"They (Intel) always say 'Oh, we know it has never worked before, but the next generation ...' It has always been the next generation. They go from one generation to the next one and to the next one. They're not faster now than they have been at any time in the past.

It is a known flaw that some models of the Radeon HD 4800 accelerators fail oZone3D FurMark, an OpenGL based graphics benchmark application that has found to stress Radeon HD 4800 series far enough to result in over-heating, artifacts or even driver crashes.

The Catalyst 8.8 drivers have found to treat the FurMark executable differently based on its file-name. Expreview tested this hypothesis by benchmarking a reference design HD 4850 board using Catalyst 8.8 driver, with two runs of FurMark.

In the first run, the test was cleared at a low score, much lower compared to those of whatever successful runs on older drivers could churn out. Suspecting that the driver could be using some sort of internal profile specific to the FurMark executable, Expreview renamed the furmark.exe file, thereby not letting the driver know it's FurMark that's being run.

Voila! the margin of lead the renamed FurMark executable gave over "furmark.exe" shows the driver to behave differently. A shady thing since Radeon HD 4800 almost became infamous for failing at FurMark, and at least passing it with a low score seemed better than failing at it altogether.

World's Leading Software Companies Rally Around NVIDIA ION

Reference graphics cards based on the GeForce GTX 275 will consist of a 633MHz core, 240 processor cores running at 1,404MHz, 896MB of GDDR3 memory operating at a frequency of 1,134MHz and a 448-bit memory bus width. Two 6-pin power connectors are used to power the graphics card, which is 10.5 inches in length and is cooled with a dual-slot fansink. Availability is expected on or before April 14th.

In a briefing earlier this week, NVIDIA also covered the increasing support from game developers for PhysX. PhysX Lab, which is a high-performance PhysX authoring and simulation tool, is being offered by NVIDIA. PhysX is now utilized across platforms, including the major console systems, and is integrated with middleware tools like Emotion FX, Maya, Max, Natural Motion, SpeedTree and XSI.

Some of the game titles that feature PhysX on the PC are Crazy Machines 2, Cryostasis, GRAW 3, Metro 2033, Mirror's Edge, MKZ, Sacred 2, Shattered Horizons, Star Tales, Unreal Tournament 3, U-wars and Warmonger. A free PhysX power pack will be available at NVIDIA's web site.

New consumer applications that will use NVIDIA's CUDA were also covered as well as Windows 7 and the DirectX compute feature. NVIDIA will also provide free CUDA power packs for the GeForce.

Reviews of the GeForce GTX 275 can be found at the following web sites:

• AnandTech
• ComputerBase
• DriverHeaven
• ExtremeTech
• FiringSquad
• Hardware Canucks
• Guru3D
• Hot Hardware
• Ninjalane
• Overclockers Club
• PC Perspective
• techPowerUp