| NVIDIA nTeresting News: 19 November 2010 |
| Written by NVIDIA - Brian Burke | ||
| Friday, 19 November 2010 | ||
NVIDIA nTeresting News: 19 November 2010In this issue:
World's Fastest Computers Use NVIDIA The November 2010 list of the "Top500" fastest supercomputers in the world was released today on https://www.top500.org/ and it revealed that NVIDIA Tesla GPUs are now powering three of the top five systems. Tesla GPUs were featured in the number one, three and four slots with the recently announced Tianhe-1A system taking the top spot with a performance record of 2.507 petaflops. It was also announced that for the first time ever, enterprises and start-ups will be able to access the supercomputing-class performance of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs through a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering, called Cluster GPU Instances. This new offering extends the available options for flexible, on-demand high performance computing (HPC) within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Fermi for The Mac Professional users operating on Mac OS X Snow Leopard...the wait is over. "This is bigger news than the Beatles, and I don't even own a Mac Pro." NVIDIA has expanded its award-winning line of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions to the Apple Mac platform, bringing the computational and visualization breakthroughs of NVIDIA Fermi architecture to Mac Pro users. "The workstation-class video [card] supports the same features as its Windows counterpart and focuses heavily on general-purpose computing. It gives a lift to OpenCL in Snow Leopard and can greatly accelerate apps that are using NVIDIA's own CUDA language as well, such as video processing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5." The NVIDIA Quadro 4000 graphics processing unit (GPU) for Mac is optimized to accelerate workflows and drive a range of top professional applications. For example, the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 software leverages NVIDIA CUDA parallel processing technology to enable film and video professionals to work unconstrained. Other examples include visual effects and image processing applications from The Foundry, including NUKE and STORM, and MATLAB from MathWorks. Demos on Film With the launch of the GeForce GTX 580, NVIDIA gave the world a great GPU. To show it off, we also gave the world two great tech demos: Endless City and Alien Vs Triangles. Endless City harnesses the horsepower of our incredible tessellation engine to procedurally generate urban detail never before possible in an interactive world. The demo positions and renders over 600 million triangles per second with a single GPU. Sit back, relax and enjoy the view, via this video. Also for your viewing pleasure we introduce the battle of ALIEN VS TRIANGLES where tessellation is used to transform and destroy an enemy using "multi-dimensional tessellation." Alien vs. Triangles is a study in using tessellation on a dynamic animating character. 3D Vision, the Standard Bearer AMD and NVIDIA are taking drastically different approaches to 3D gaming. NVIDIA is providing a complete solution, with an ecosystem of over 1,000 products supported. AMD wants you to think 3D Vision is bad, so they are calling their option an ‘open standard'. We believe that in this case ‘open' is just code for ‘we will let third parties do all the work, control all the quality, and support our customers with updates and profiles'. AMD's HD3D technology sounds good on paper, until you can't actually use it. Many reviewers are trying hard to review games with AMD HD3D, with little results. NVIDIA vs. AMD in 3D with the record-breaking titleCall of Duty: Black Ops is the next great example of the difference in the two offerings. "Timing has always been a problem in first-person stereo gaming so it was nice to see a CoD game I can play that renders properly in stereo3d [3D Vision] mode, including the cut scenes. There were no ghosting issues during game play (only in a few cut scenes) and both the iron sights and the in-game crosshairs aligned perfectly. I am actually now interested if I can play Stereo3D Call of Duty Black Ops on my other AMD system. Although after a quick Google search, it looks like it will take a bit of elbow grease to set up as the AMD HD3D solution relies on third-party drivers like iZ3D and Tri-Def and it doesn't seem to be compatible my 120Hz LCD monitors. Plus it looks like there is currently a problem with running Call of Duty Black Ops with AMD's HD3D solution (iZ3D). I am hoping that AMD would dedicate as much time developing an in-house 3D solution rather than relying on 3rd party developers which adds to the time and complexity of the stereo 3d ecosystem. The more complex and more companies are involved, the more it will also cost and the least likely the updates will be. Also, I'm not really comfortable with paying extra for licensed drivers when I already shelled out money for the hardware. NVIDIA's solution is just plain simpler and I don't think there's any shame if AMD tried to copy their approach to 3D implementation since it is very effective. In the end, all it really comes down to is whether it works or not, and I'm sure most people who bought the 3D system would say the same thing and not be concerned too much about the 3D implementation being an open-platform or proprietary." If experts that test hardware for a living have nightmare experiences with AMD HD3D, what will the average consumer experience? "When testing AMD 3D and NVIDIA 3D Vision we are quite limited in the scenarios where the two can be compared. This is due to the limitations of AMD's implementation which uses 3rd party drivers to enable the 3D effect. These 3rd party drivers lack the support and polish of the NVIDIA alternative. From bugs to lack of game support, AMD disappoints and the experience is made worse by the fact that support for DirectX 10 and 11 is patchy at best. Not only that though, we cannot use Crossfire with AMD 3D. So, to summarize... single GPU only and DirectX 9 games have the most chance of working. With NVIDIA we can pretty much play anything we want in 3D, in fact there is only one game in our test suite which doesn't yet have some form of 3D support and that is Medal of Honor (single player). Therefore we opted for Left 4 Dead 2 as our comparison as it is one of the few games we have seen work on AMD hardware in 3D. For the NVIDIA testing we are using the ASUS VG236H screen and 3D Vision Kit, AMD it is a Zalman Trimon screen with passive glasses and the iZ3D driver which costs $30 after the initial 30 day trial. Configuration, software and hardware issues aside the performance of the AMD solution allows us to play Left 4 Dead 2 in 3D at our chosen settings with decent image quality. We do need to tweak the stereo effect in our drivers before playing to get the best 3D effect though. On the NVIDIA front the experience is better as performance is higher, the active glasses give a better 3D image quality and there is no configuration required. Simply enable 3D and its good to go." AMD's disarray in 3D may be the consequence of a lack of strategy or the result of having insufficient resources to develop the technology to support it. Either way, their customer's experience will suffer. NVIDIA Based-Notebooks: Best of.... The year is drawing to a close, so media are putting together their lists. Anandtech kicked it off with a Holiday Gift Guide of the best products for Santa to bring. In the gift guide NVIDIA GPUs swept the consumer category in the Anandtech gift guide.
Laptop Magazine jumped in the fray with a list of the top notebooks for 2010. 4 out of 5 of Laptop Magazine's best notebooks are based on NVIDIA GPUs and associated technology.
On top of that, the Dell XPS 15 recently won the Anandtech Editor's Choice Gold Award and PC Magazine Editor's Choice Award. GeForce 400M GPUs support the NVIDIA features that set our GPUs apart from the competition, including: NVIDIA Optimus technology, NVIDIA PhysX, NVIDIA 3D Vision, NVIDIA 3DTV Play and NVIDIA Verde drivers to keep your notebook optimized for tomorrow. AMD Cayman Smells Fishy NVIDIA just introduced the world's fastest GPU, the GeForce GTX 580. AMD tried to spoil the party by telling reviewers about their latest phantom products, the Radeon HD 6900 Series. But shortly after our hard launch, AMD's stuff was delayed. "We are ultimately faced with several options. AMD either lied to us in one form or another to ensure that we recommend to buyers interested in a GeForce GTX 580 to wait, while the delay of the Radeon HD 6900 was already evident due to excessive inventories of Radeon HD 5800, manufacturing problem of the card or GPU or Cayman Focus drivers dedicated to it. AMD realized afterwards that the Radeon HD 6970 would have difficulties with the GeForce GTX 580 and decided to review the specifications of it to ensure pass." Still, it was too little, too late: "If this conjecture is even remotely true, the Radeon HD 6850 1GB and HD 6870 1GB will look laughably underpowered in comparison. So, what can we expect from the GeForce 500-series? It could well be seen as one of NVIDIA's most brilliant GPU ranges since the GeForce 8-series. If so, ATI will have failed to take full advantage of the DX11 monopoly it was gifted late last year." You can buy GeForce GTX 580s today. Reviews have been stellar. It is DirectX 11 done right. Boxee Box teardown The Boxee box was highly anticipated when they announced it. It was based on Tegra. Then they switched to Intel. Engadget has an interesting article where they look in side HOLY COW LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT GIANT FREAKIN' HEATSINK!!!!!!! Related Articles:
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