With a camera on everything from your phone, to your handheld gaming device, to your iPod, and ...well, your camera - everyone is accumulating a huge pile of digital pictures. With this kind of volume, photo collections can be difficult to organize, until now. For the first time on the PC, there’s a quick and easy way to organize and search all of your photos based on who’s in them.

"An NVIDIA GPU is for more than just games," said Sanford Russell, general manager of the CUDA group at NVIDIA. "It is the perfect processor for manipulating pictures, video and other visual data, and CUDA is what makes this possible. It's great to see CyberLink at the forefront of this technology trend."

More Pictures, This Time in 3D

Last week NVIDIA launched a new section of the 3D Vision website for 3D pictures. With the upcoming launch of the Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1 camera in US and Europe, NVIDIA plans to document the world in 3D and make their website the #1 place on the web to download 3D pictures. NVIDIA already features photos from Quakecon, Blizzcon and some cool classic cars. View the pictures with 3D Vision or 3D Vision Discover glasses.

Men's Health in Russia recently named NVIDIA 3D Vision one of its 24 "Must Have Technologies"

"We're uncommonly lucky because over our life span we were able to follow the progress of computer games from the arcade machines for 'Battleship' in lobbies of the Soviet cinemas up to a full capable home 3D. The latest one became possible recently, when NVIDIA introduced its GeForce 3D Vision glasses. It provides really awesome effects - it looks like all the game events are going on around you".

The ION GPU is a world-class product that allows users to watch HD video, edit their photos and video, and play modern games. It pairs very well with an Atom CPU. Legit Reviews has paired them up in a home theater PC they built around the Asus ION motherboard.

"The NVIDIA ION graphics processor is what really makes this build so special though, as it brings the graphics power that consumers demand to this small mini-ITX form factor. The 16 processor cores inside the NVIDIA Ion graphics processor are just enough to run the NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology for high-definition Blu-ray playback. The end result is flawless HD and SD video playback that ultimately make the system able to be a great small form factor Home Theater system."

"Samsung has unveiled a trio of updated netbooks, including the N510, the first to be supercharged with NVIDIA's ION platform. Samsung's new N510 boasts an 11.6in screen with a native resolution of 1,366 x 768, and a NVIDIA ION chipset which promises improved HD video and graphical capabilities."

"We got the chance to play around with the N510 ahead of the crowds at IFA and we're thoroughly impressed."

To get the best experience with today's visual computing applications you need to make sure your PC has the right mix of CPU/GPU horsepower. ION does the trick for tiny platforms.

"So if you find yourself working with pictures all the time, converting video files or otherwise doing visually intensive work on your computer it’d be worth your time and money to look for a powerful GPU in your next computer. Keep your eyes peeled for computers like the Lenovo S12 which will soon ship with an NVIDIA ION GPU and other computers coming this fall which can take advantage of the CUDA processing power."

Snow Leopard is Loose, OpenCL in the Wild

Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system is the first OS to integrate OpenCL, a cross-platform open standard that makes it possible for developers to tap into the vast gigaflops of computing power currently in the GPU and use them for any application.

"NVIDIA chairs the OpenCL working group and is the only company to have OpenCL drivers for the GPU in the hands of thousands of Snow Leopard, Windows and Linux developers today," said Sanford Russell, general manager of CUDA at NVIDIA. "We're excited to see Snow Leopard ship, signaling the arrival GPU Computing for all Apple users."

GeForce + Core i5 + P55 Motherboard = Gaming Nirvana

The press raved this week about the new Core i5 CPU from Intel, which delivers incredible performance for less than $200. This is great news for gamers, who can save money on their CPU with i5 and invest more where it counts: graphics.

"When gaming is your top priority, buy 'just enough' CPU and reallocate the rest of your budget toward graphics."

"It should be noted that the Power of 3 platforms deliver the stunning capabilities and technologies which are not available when using a 3A platform. Among them are the highly efficient PhysX engine, the comprehensive video encoding tools from the third party, and the high-quality or highly cost-effective virtual 3D Stereoscopic solutions."

Ian Buck Talks GPU Computing

NVIDIA's Ian Buck was into GPU Computing when GPU Computing wasn't cool. He has been called "the father of the Brook language" (the programming language ultimately adopted by AMD/ATI) and was involved in GPGPU in its infancy. With Snow Leopard and Windows 7 both offering GPU Computing capabilities, Ian shared his views on GPU Computing and NVIDIA CUDA technology with Tom's Hardware.

"Some of the work I'm most proud of is in medical imaging and cancer research. Techniscan is a company using our Tesla GPUs to improve a doctor's ability to detect and diagnose breast cancer earlier and more accurately than traditional methods. The National Cancer Institute is reporting a 12x CUDA-enabled speedup in protein ligand calculations used to design new drugs for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's. It is wonderful to see GPU computing being used in some of the fundamental research that will save lives."

PhysX Makes It Real

One of the hot topics with Batman: Arkham Asylum is the use of NVIDIA PhysX to make "canned" reactions a thing of the past. With PhysX, the Batman universe comes to life with blazing explosions, reactive debris, realistic water, and lifelike character motion.

"For instance, paper that is scattered in abundance shuffle and flutter around while Batman is walking over them or fighting enemies. The tiles on the ground will also break and chip if any kind of force hits them, like a hard hit with the Batarang. There's even volumetric fog to be seen and cloth physics that allow it to actually be ripped.

Overall, these little changes may seem insignificant, but looking at the video below (which gives more examples), it adds an extra layer of realism and atmosphere to the PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum."

vReveal Has New Stuff

vReveal is an amazingly easy, one-click application for quickly fixing dark, shaky, noisy, pixilated, or blurry video clips. Only vReveal offers the patented super-resolution algorithms that can increase resolution, significantly reduce video noise, and provide sophisticated stabilization. Using the massively parallel processing power in NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs, vReveal instantly cleans up videos that are shaky, dark, noisy, or blurry.

• NVIDIA "G80" models now supported for GPU acceleration (GeForce 8800 Ultra, 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS 640, 8800 GTS 320; Quadro 4600 and 5600).
• Even more powerful video stabilization, plus auto-cropping of black bars from around stabilized videos.
• Integrated Facebook video uploader -- the first of its kind in a desktop app.
• New output formats including DivX and MJPEG AVI (Joins the previous output options of WMV and uncompressed AVI).
• Japanese localization, to go with English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

HPCWire has an interesting take on where GPUs are heading and they think it will include improvements in memory technology - specifically error corrected memory.

"My sense is that ECC will come to GPU computing products sooner (1-2 years) rather that later (3-5 years). Being able to ensure data integrity in these devices will widen the aperture for HPC applications and help push GPGPU into true supercomputers. Just like double precision performance and on-board memory capacity, error correction is destined to become an important differentiator in high-end GPU computing."

On the eve of so many upcoming GPU and CPU announcements it is only appropriate to take a step back and re-evaluate the status quo with a critical eye.

The computer industry is on the cusp of yet another turn of Sutherland's Wheel of Reincarnation, with the graphics processor unit (GPU) cast as the heir apparent of the floating point co-processors of days long gone. Modern GPUs are ostensibly higher performance and more power efficient than CPUs for their target workload, and many companies and media outlets claim they are leaving CPUs in the dust. Is this really the case though?

This article explores the quantitative basis for these claims, with some surprising results. Once you consider the larger die area and power consumption for modern GPUs, the efficiency advantages aren't quite as tremendous as they seem at first glance.

With the launch of the Microsoft Zune HD, consumers are beginning to see the potential of NVIDIA's Tegra. Tegra can power a variety of of devices.

"One of the processors leading the charge in this smartpad space is NVIDIA's Tegra; I have especially been watching its use in the new Zuneplayer from Microsoft."

"The beauty of Tegra is that while it works well in small hand-held devices like the Zune, it can really strut its stuff in larger devices like a tablet."

Samsung officially announced its M1 portable media player last week at the IFA show in Germany and it has even been unboxed.

"We got the chance to play around with the N510 ahead of the crowds at IFA and we're thoroughly impressed."

Tegra is powering the next generation smartphones, smartbooks, and portable media players with a full internet experience, rich multimedia, HD movies/TV/video/games and 3D user interfaces, with extended battery life. The M1 is only the beginning!

Avalanche of Awards Continues for Notebook GPUs

The flood of awards for notebooks with NVIDIA Mobile GPUs continues because GeForce GPUs offer graphics performance that is second to none, and "Graphics Plus", features such as:

• Direct downloadable drivers
• PhysX support, for in-game physics
• CUDA-support for GPU computing applications

"As our benchmark numbers show, the Alienware M17x is the fastest gaming notebook on the market."

"Alienware calls this thing the most powerful 17-inch laptop in the universe and barring an alien civilization possessing something better, I'll tentatively agree with the boast."

"The G51Vx-A1 is meant to be a solid performer for gamers on the go, and in that it succeeds admirably. It will play anything you throw at it without a problem, and the vast majority of games can be played at maximum settings with perfectly smooth frame rates."

"Just how powerful (the system should range from very to insanely) will depend on what upgrades you get, but anything with the dual 280M graphics cards will easily take on the games of this and, in all likelihood, next generation. The dual 260M graphics card are a great option as well, and will save buyers some cash."

A quick trip to the NVIDIA web site tells you that:

"When combined with a low-power CPU like Intel Atom, ION graphics processors transform traditional under-performing PC designs into a premium experience."

"NVIDIA's Ion chipset turns the humble Atom nettop into a versatile, surprisingly capable PC that overcomes the limitations of today's small form factor systems."

ION also gets a nice performance bump from CUDA.

"Gary had a particularly great experience with transcoding using CyberLink's Media Espresso. Using one of our standard transcoding test files Gary made a high quality YouTube video with just the Atom 330 CPU in 405 seconds. Turning on GPU acceleration dropped the time to 261 seconds."

Take your Own 3D Movies and Pics

NVIDIA posted an updated NVIDIA 3D Vision Video Player v1.4.7 which added an important new feature, support for multi-stream AVI files that are captured with the Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1 camera. This camera can capture up to 640x480 3D video and it can be viewed on a 3D Vision system. NVIDIA used the camera to take pics at Quakecon and Blizzcon.

Holy Graphics Plus, Batman!

Batman: Arkham Asylum is all the buzz and it is chalked full of PhysX and 3D Vision goodness.

"We sat through a demonstration of some of the earlier levels in the game, which showed the way that the PhysX rendering will enhance all particle effects, while 3D Vision will make them pop out of the screen. Batman looks good beating the stuffing out of thugs, but when the time comes to pry a grille out of a wall, the bolts will pop out of the screen, and the cobwebs in the air vent will sway procedurally to and fro. Batman uses his grapnel to vault up onto gargoyles in the shadows, and bits of stone and rubble go bouncing out of the walls each time the hook hits home."

With C and Fortran language support and API's including OpenCL and DirectX Compute available from NVIDIA, GPU computing is now mainstream. With C for CUDA, GPU Computing is paying dividends today.

From enhancing low quality video:

"What I really like: vReveal has been specially tuned to run up to five times faster on CUDA-enabled NVIDIA graphics processors. That means you can process video enhancements in less time and have your CPU available for normal everyday tasks. Lucky me again: I have NVIDIA VGA!"

"The evaluation shows for forward algorithm, our CUDA implementation achieves performance of 23.3 GFLOP/s and has up to 800X speedup over the implementation based on single core CPU; and for Baum-Welch algorithm, the performance is 4.3 GFLOP/s and there is also 200X speedup over CPU implementation."

"Indeed, a study last year by University of Pittsburgh researchers found that an NVIDIA GPU produced much speedier computerized-tomography images of lung cancer than was possible with a CPU. As a result, the researchers concluded, the benefit of using GPUs' processing power can be widely appreciated in medical image devices and diagnosis."

NVIDIA's C with CUDA extensions was an inspiration for OpenCL and other programming interfaces. OpenCL, DirectCompute, C with CUDA extensions and The Portland Group’s Fortran extensions all use similar concepts for porting parallel applications to the GPU. NVIDIA is the only processor company to offer this breadth of development environments for the GPU.

Version 1.1 adds direct upload to Facebook, upload to YouTube in HD and DivX output. New capabilities join a host of powerful enhancement features based on the advanced technology of MotionDSP’s Ikena, unrivaled forensic software used worldwide by law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies.

• NVIDIA "G80" models now supported for GPU acceleration (GeForce 8800 Ultra, 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS 640, 8800 GTS 320; Quadro 4600 and 5600)
• Even more powerful video stabilization, plus auto-cropping of black bars from around stabilized videos
• New output formats including DivX and MJPEG AVI (joins the previous output options of WMV and uncompressed AVI)
• Japanese localization (full set is now English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese)
• Integrated Facebook video uploader

CRN published a brief analysis on the state of Windows 7 DirectCompute. While many folks wrongly position CUDA as a competitor to DirectCompute and OpenCL, CRN sees the bigger picture.

"Overall, DirectCompute is taking the idea behind CUDA and acknowledging its benefits. NVIDIA did a great job nurturing the architecture and convincing developers to enhance their applications to take advantage of it, and with Microsoft joining in, the model is sure to become a de facto standard".

10/10 Performance...and Graphics Plus

NVIDIA Mobile GPUs continue to provide award-winning performance. The GeForce 200M Series positions NVIDIA to take advantage of the Windows 7 launch and the rapidly growing notebook market. Others, like The Enderle Group, are seeing it as well.

"I want a machine I can play on, and Intel graphics suck, so good graphics are critical. Apple got smart and put NVIDIA graphics on every machine it sells. I think others should take the example to heart. Remember Windows 7 has a big graphics component with DirectX 11 and DirectCompute (Apple has Open CL) so graphics will be important. With Vista, it was the folks that didn't have good graphics that were the most disappointed (they sued)."

"For those who want to clean up or enhance video files such as those recorded on mobile phones, VReveal is a useful application. While the end result is impressive, the work required to process these movie files is significant and as the figures show the quad core Intel chip in the M17x has 96% CPU use providing 5 frames per second. When GPU processing is enabled on the 9400 the framerate nearly doubles and CPU use falls to 27%. Switching to the GeForce 280M adds 3fps more and drops the CPU use to 15%, an impressive increase in performance, which results in a significant decrease in the time taken to complete the task".

• PhysX support, for in-game physics
• CUDA-support for GPU computing applications
• Direct downloadable drivers

Parallel programming is THE next big thing for the world of computing because it delivers dramatic acceleration for a variety of applications. NVIDIA is the pioneering force behind using the GPU for computing. To push it forward even faster, NVIDIA will be working with TopCoder, a competitive software development community, on the "CUDA Superhero Challenge", a series of contests for computer programmers who will harness the parallel processing power of the NVIDIA CUDA architecture to solve some of computing’s biggest challenges.

"The PC architecture has evolved from central processing on just the CPU to co-processing on the CPU and the GPU," said Sanford Russell, general manager of the CUDA group at NVIDIA. "By tapping into the TopCoder community, we can educate over 200,000 programmers on the advantages parallel programming offers and fan the flames of the GPU Computing revolution."

Henson's Latest Emmy Linked to Quadro

The Engineering Emmy was awarded to Henson Digital Puppetry Studio, a real-time animation system that allows performers to puppeteer and voice digital characters in real-time, dramatically reducing both animation time and cost. The revolutionary studio features multiple virtual camera production systems and real-time animation viewing systems, all powered by NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics processors.

"When we embarked on this project, we searched for the best technology out there, and NVIDIA quickly became our graphics solution of choice," said Steffen Wild, director, Henson Digital Puppetry Studio. "Since then, a great partnership has emerged, enabling us to achieve this new form of creative expression. We have been developing our production pipeline for the past several years, based on the vision of Jim Henson, who started exploring the possibilities of digital puppetry back in 1989," continued Wild. "Back then, computers weren’t fast enough to provide real-time feedback. However over the past few years, graphics processors have truly evolved. Today, our viewing software delivers an entire scene in real-time, and its performance is driven by the NVIDIA Quadro FX solution."

GeForce 9600 GT Gets Low

Need a low profile, low power graphics card for a home theater PC? Galaxy may have the card for you.

"To say that I underestimated Galaxy 9600GT would be an understatement in itself."

3D Vision Ought to Be in Pictures

Last week NVIDIA made the 3D Vision v1.11 CD available for download. This also contains the GeForce v190.62 WHQL driver that features DirectCompute support. After you grab it, be sure to nab their first 3D Vision Picture PowerPack. At QuakeCon 2009, NVIDIA took a variety of pictures of the event and created a self-running 3D slideshow. These 3D pictures were taken with the brand new Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W1 camera, which is shipping in Japan now, and will be available in other regions later this year. This PowerPack requires the latest 3D Vision drivers and a 3D Vision or 3D Vision Discover system. Look for new pictures from BlizzCon 2009 coming soon as well!

Power of 3

Intel’s upcoming Lynnfield CPUs and P55 platforms are going to be great for gamers. They promise strong performance at a great value, and are a perfect platform for GeForce GPUs. There are many advantages to using GeForce with P55 platforms: excellent performance, superior multi-GPU support, and greater immersion in games with PhysX and 3D Vision.

"By now you should all know that PhysX is here to stay and considering the list of games which will be released in the coming months with PhysX support, we can't see why you would want to turn a blind eye at this point. In addition, Windows 7 is about to usher in a whole new realm of possibilities when it comes to using your graphics card for parallel computing tasks and whether ATI fans want to admit it or not; NVIDIA is at the forefront of GPU Compute technologies. The Lynnfield platform has a real possibility to make NVIDIA's 'Power of 3' a household name."