NVIDIA demonstrated leadership in the GPU Computing revolution by receiving Windows Hardware Qualification Lab (WHQL) certification for a driver supporting DirectCompute and Windows 7.

"Windows 7 combined with applications that take advantage of the new DirectCompute technology have the potential to transform the personal computing experience for millions of customers using GPUs to turbo-charge scenarios in digital media applications," said Mike Ybarra, general manager for Windows Product Management at Microsoft Corp.

"We've already seen some applications come to market that take advantage of the GPU, Windows 7 and DirectCompute will make it even easier for developers to write applications and deliver these benefits to millions of additional customers."

DirectCompute enables applications in Windows 7 to take advantage of GPU Computing to accelerate applications. DirectCompute will be distributed as part of the DirectX 11 API and is already supported by NVIDIA’s current lineup of DirectX 10 GPUs.

CUDA Makes Ray Tracing 1000 Times Faster

The Chaos Group demonstrated an update to its ray tracer render, V Ray RT, at Siggraph. What kind of a speed up do they see with GPU rending and CUDA?

"Its first performance demonstrations show that in the simplest demonstrations, a single GeForce GTX 285 1GB card is as much as 1000x faster than Core i7 2.93 GHz with all eight threads active."

Award Winning Notebooks Use NVIDIA GPUs

Notebooks featuring NVIDIA GPUs continue to win awards. Hot Hardware recommends the Asus G51Vx featuring the GeForce GTX 260M GPU in an optimized PC.

"A quick look at mobile gaming machines in the $1000 price range reveals very little competition. We find notebooks with slower 9800M and 9600M graphics solutions that can't keep up with the GTX 260M found on the G51VX. Moreover, looking for laptops with the GTX 260M reveals options that cost $300-$600 more than our review product. How did Asus do it? Looking at the G51VX's specifications reveals that this model uses a 2.0GHz dual-core CPU which is a bit slower but more affordable than the processors used by the competition. Needless to say, Asus has configured a well balanced machine that is a winner at its price point."

Tom's Guide, thinks the GeForce 9400M-powered Dell Studio XPS 13 is perfect, with a 5 out of 5 rating.

"The Dell Studio XPS 13 is a laptop that has it all. You can use it for gaming, watching films or working, and the battery will keep you going whatever you want to use it for. It's an excellent choice for anybody who's looking to replace an older desktop PC with a mobile, multifunction laptop."

In France, Portables4Gamers proclaims the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M SLI-powered Alienware M17x the king of the hill.

"This M17x is the Alienware phoenix, the renewal of the myth of the world's most powerful mobile system."

"Additionally, the GTX280M SLI graphics solution is without question the most powerful of its kind we have ever seen in a laptop and gaming performance is nothing short of exceptional."

Quakecon Was a Blast

NVIDIA escaped the summer heat with an all-weekend long gaming festival in Dallas, Texas, known as Quakecon. Powered by ASUS and Republic of Gamers, the NVIDIA Gaming Bunker was located at the entrance of the BYOC and open non-stop from the very first hour of Quakecon to the blurry-eyed end.

NVIDIA and Quakecon attendees joined the Quakecon & NVIDIA Folding@Home team, a first-of-its-kind effort whose goal was to use the massive computing power in the BYOC in conjunction with Folding@Home to help search for a cure on protein-folding related diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and many forms of cancer. Not to mention the NVIDIA TV stage show, featuring Batman: Arkham Asylum on a 60 foot screen in 3D.

The demonstration, showing a section of the game that's not in the recently released PC demo, showcased the game's support of NVIDIA's 3D Vision technology. Using a polarized video projector attached to a PC and then having the game's image thrown up on the massive screen had folks seeing The Dark Knight take out a bunch of enemies with that extra dimension that is usually seen in a state of the art 3D movie theater screen. NVIDIA also showed part of the recently released Resident Evil 4 3D benchmark demo on the big screen.

GPU Physics Has a Clear Leader

While NVIDIA was busy at Quakecon showing of the great PhysX effects in Batman: Arkham Asylum, TechArp was writing about physics in games, namely Havok and PhysX.

"Our tests showed just how important GPU acceleration of physics is if we want to be able to enjoy virtual environments with realistic physics in real time. Without GPU acceleration, such games would be unplayable. Little wonder why both Intel and ATI/AMD are working hard to deliver GPU acceleration of the Havok physics engine."

"Until Intel and ATI/AMD deliver their Havok-based solution though, NVIDIA enjoys a significant advantage in the graphics card market. Their GeForce and Quadro graphics cards are currently the only ones that can accelerate game physics, greatly improving their performance in games that use the PhysX engine. Best of all, every NVIDIA graphics card from GeForce 8 series onwards were instantly 'upgraded' with this feature at no extra charge."

• PhysX support, for in-game physics
• NVIDIA 3D Vision support
• CUDA support for GPU computing applications such as vReveal, Badaboom, Arcsoft SimHD, Super Loiloscope, and more
• Direct downloadable drivers for notebooks

ION Kudos Worldwide

Reviews for the world's first Zotac motherboard are hot off the press with over 40 reviews in 16 countries. How did it do?

Bit-Tech.net - UK

"One hell of a mighty little machine..."

"a magnificent product..."

"Compared to the Intel 945G solution which has difficulty playing 720p video, the ION chipset which can play 1080p video with no problem is beyond great."

"...it's going to be nearly impossible to best this option."

Crytek Counts on NVIDIA GeForce

If you delivered the measuring stick for gaming graphics with your last two gaming franchises — let's call them FarCry and Crysis. And you wanted to debut your new gaming technology - call it CryEngine 3. Which GPU would you count on to deliver on stage at SIGGRAPH 2009 conference in New Orleans with the whole world watching?

Want to try out 3D gaming before you buy an NVIDIA 3D Vision set-up? Now you can discover amazing stereoscopic 3D on your Windows 7 or Windows Vista PC with NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. NVIDIA 3D Vision Discover is a complete, low cost solution to start your stereoscopic 3D experience that includes specialized anaglyph (red/cyan) glasses, NVIDIA software to transform over 350 standard PC games into full 3D, and NVIDIA 3D Movie and Video player software. For a limited time, get a free pair of 3D Vision Discover glasses and World of WarCraft Classic with the purchase of a select GeForce graphics card from North American etailers such as MWAVE, NCIX, Newegg, TigerDirect and ZipZoomfly.

Holy Flying Fists, Batman!!!

Batman: Arkham Asylum brings the DC Comics’ universe to life with stunning graphics, lifelike physics, and awesome 3D visuals. This game is a flagship for both PhysX and 3D Vision. Fight the Joker and Gotham City’s most notorious villains, who have taken over the asylum, all in 3D. Download the Batman Arkham Asylum demo from nZone.com or preview Batman: Arkham Asylum in 3D before you install the demo with the Batman Arkham Asylum 3D Vision PowerPack with in-game 3D screenshots.

Small Notebooks, Big Graphics

Demand for netbooks and nettops worldwide is growing. Every market and region is seeing the value in low cost PCs. There is a great opportunity to add a true GPU to deliver the best visual computing experience. The Dell Studio 14z is the latest example of a small notebook that is making big waves by beefing up its graphics.

"System performance is excellent considering the sub-$1,000 price. The NVIDIA 9400M graphics offer superior video playback and gaming when compared to Intel integrated graphics."

"Indeed, the $649 starting price of the Studio 14z starts to look even better when you consider the NVIDIA graphics performance and large storage drive options."

The CUDA 500 - It's Catching On

CUDA is the name of NVIDIA's parallel computing hardware architecture. NVIDIA provides a complete toolkit for programming the CUDA architecture that includes the compiler, debugger, profiler, libraries and other information developers need to deliver production quality products that use the CUDA architecture. The CUDA architecture also supports standard languages and APIs for GPU Computing, such as OpenCL and DirectX Compute. There are now 500 CUDA applications and papers posted on CUDAZone.

Quadro is the Tool for Professionals

NVIDIA has a full range of robust professional solutions, spanning graphics boards, visual computing systems, and software development tools that have become the standard for professional visualization environments. PCinlife, a top IT magazine in China, recently looked at the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800.

"Quadro FX 5800 is the professional graphics solution with the greatest software-hardware mix, the most complete workflow support and the widest support from the industry. As for high-end users, it's hard to find a rival even close to it right now."

GPU OpenCL Support: ATI is MIA

The Khronos Group announced OpenGL 3.2, the third major update in twelve months to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API for personal computers and workstations. NVIDIA posted their beta drivers the same morning that the OpenGL ARB released the Open GL 3.2 specification. Grab the NVIDIA OpenCL driver here.

As with physics, ATI seems to be ignoring OpenCL on the GPU.

"Despite releasing an updated version of its ATI Stream SDK last week, AMD still doesn't support GPU acceleration for OpenCL applications. The current release, version 2.0 beta 2, only supports x86 CPUs with support for SSE3 (or later) and GPU support isn't included."

NVIDIA Puts the HD in Zune HD

Microsoft officially announced last week that it is taking preorders for the highly anticipated Zune HD portable media player. Powered by NVIDIA Tegra, the world's first ultra-low-power HD processor, the Zune HD is the first Tegra-based device available to consumers. Tegra brings the ultimate visual experience to the new Zune HD. Consumers can enjoy the Zune’s 720p HD capabilities, full-featured Web browsing, vivid, high-resolution photos and exceptional battery life. Nothing has matched Tegra's ability to play music in our tests for 25 days or HD video for 10 hours on a single charge. Early feedback on the Zune HD's capabilities due to Tegra have been outstanding.

"Microsoft's Zune HD will use one of the most powerful chips to go into a portable media player yet: NVIDIA's multicore Tegra processor."

"Tegra takes NVIDIA's graphics technology and combines it with two low-powered ARM-based CPUs and other specialized chips to create a small but powerful package optimized for devices such as the Zune HD, whose purported specs... have many early adopters drooling."

Wired published a piece discussing how NVIDIA's Tesla, known as a Personal Supercomputer, is changing the way people work. Today, scientific research is carried out on supercomputing clusters, a shared resource that consumes hundreds of kilowatts of power and costs millions of dollars to build and maintain. As a result, researchers must compete for time on these resources, slowing their work and delaying results.

Stone's team got "personal supercomputers," compact machines with a stack of graphics processors that together pack quite a punch and can be used to run complex simulations.

"Now instead of taking a couple of days and waiting in a queue, we can do the calculations locally," says Stone. "We can do more and better science."

One is example is Evolved Machines, who has activated a 10,800-core parallel computing facility dedicated to the development of artificial neural circuits. The system incorporates 42 NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing processors, controlled by14 quad-core AMD Phenom conventional microprocessors, and has a nominal computation capacity of over 40 TFLOPS. The computing facility was established to enable the artificial evolution of simulated neural circuitry for sensory processing, both in artificial olfaction and vision.

NVIDIA Tesla GPU computing solutions help to solve the world’s most important computing challenges using the unprecedented performance of GPU computing, more quickly and accurately across many industries.

GeForce is Best for the Cause

Stanford University's distributed computing program Folding@home has become a major force in researching cures to life-threatening diseases such as cancer, cystic fibrosis, and Parkinson's disease by combining the computing horsepower of millions of processors to simulate protein folding. To build the best folding rig, Bit-tech says go with GeForce.

"There's also a huge disparity between ATI and NVIDIA GPUs. Although the gap is closing, NVIDIA GPUs produce far more ppd per pound than ATI GPUs."

The Folding@home project is just one example in the expanding list of non-gaming applications for GPUs. By running the Folding@home client on an NVIDIA GeForce GPU, protein-folding simulations can be done up to 140 times faster than on today's CPUs. This is another example of using the right tool for the job.

"As CPU performance isn't critical to the folding GPU client, you can also get away with using a cheaper CPU."

Another example is BOINC, a unique approach to supercomputing in which multiple consumer computers are joined together over the Internet, and their combined computing power is used to tackle very large computational tasks for scientific research projects such as SETI@home (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), GPUgrid (high-performance biomolecular simulations for scientific research) or Einstein@home (search for spinning neutron stars, also called pulsars).

Distributed computing fans are quickly discovering they can get a lot more accomplished by using the GPU for the processing, rather than the CPU. It is the right tool for the job.

3D Vision and Resident Evil 5 at ComicCon

MaximumPC was at ComicCon and they interviewed Capcom's Mike Webster about Resident Evil 5 for PC and NVIDIA's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" program. They promise the PC experience to be unique compared with the console version. One way to accomplish that is with NVIDIA 3D Vision.

Developers have 3D Vision in their hands and are doing incredible things with it, such as the out-of-screen effects in Resident Evil 5.

Windows 7 and GPU Computing

Atomic PC, in the land down under, knows that co-processing is the next big thing.

"While this approach is more than acceptable, both NVIDIA and Microsoft reckon there's a world of performance to be unlocked if both the CPU and GPU can share the load."

NVIDIA is the pioneering force behind using the GPU for computing. DirectX Compute will enable massive parallelism to the masses. What we are talking about is co-processing—essentially using the right tool for the job.

Microsoft had released Windows 7 to manufacturing, so it is on the way. Rene Haas, NVIDIA's general manager of notebook graphics, has shared his thoughts on getting your notebook ready for Windows 7 and on the GPU computing boom that DirectCompute will deliver. He offers advice that works for more applications than the operating system.

"You should also protect yourself by getting a notebook that can be upgraded to the Windows 7 operating system. And this is about more than just having adequate hardware. Without the correct Windows 7 drivers for your notebook, you will not be able to move to the new operating system."

NVIDIA has worked diligently over the past year to modularize its driver architecture and develop a unified driver install package that will not only work with laptops from all manufacturers but also maintain all of their specific model customizations such as hotkeys and suspend and resume functionality.

Alienware Rolls with GeForce GTX 280M SLI

As predicted, the Alienware M17x is being hailed as the World's Fastest Gaming Notebook, thanks in large part to the GeForce GTX 280M SLI configuration. Hot Hardware provides the video and a stamp of approval.

The GeForce GTX 280M GPU is up to 50% faster and provides up to 80% better performance per watt than the product it replaces. GeForce GPUs offer graphics performance that is second to none, and “Graphics Plus” features including:

• Direct downloadable drivers
• CUDA-support to GPU computing applications such as vReveal, Badaboom, Arcsoft SimHD, Super Loiloscope, and more
• PhysX support, for in-game physics

NVIDIA was in New Orleans last week for Siggraph and introduced the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine, the world's first interactive ray tracing engine to leverage the GPU. It was part of a suite of application acceleration engines for software developers.

NVIDIA acceleration engines make it easy to incorporate valuable, high-performance capabilities into applications, while simultaneously reducing development time. NVIDIA application acceleration engines unveiled at Siggraph 2009 include:

• NVIDIA OptiX engine for real-time ray tracing
• NVIDIA SceniX engine for managing 3D data and scenes
• NVIDIA CompleX engine for scaling performance across multiple GPUs
• NVIDIA PhysX 64-bit engine for real-time, hyper-realistic physical and environmental effects

NVIDIA had 13 presentations at SIGGRAPH 2009. They also released the first version of their OpenCL Best Practices Guide to all 5,000+ GPU Computing Registered Developers.

This is another important demonstration of NVIDIA leadership in GPU computing, and their continued investment in programmer productivity through documentation and tools.

Today we will be examining the eVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC. As can be gleamed from the name, this card is built using the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 chip. Video cards based upon this GPU have been on the market for a while, and have had this graphics card power my system for the past few months.