Posts tagged with nvidia

Nintendo DS To Get Tegra 2 In The Future?

Posted on November 16, 2009 7:55 AM

While there isn’t anything official just yet, word is going around that Nintendo’s future DS portable gaming device could be using NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 mobile processor. Such a move would certainly help Nintendo boost the performance of its DS lineup, and hardcore gamers will certainly welcome the ability to play more complex games or games with better graphics. So keep your fingers crossed, and we’ll keep you posted on the latest on this situation.

NVIDIA ION Cube PC Mod

Posted on November 15, 2009 10:04 AM

Bill Owens has a rather nice way of showing his support for NVIDIA, in the form of the award-winning NVIDIA ION Cube PC case mod, which as its name implies, is based on NVIDIA’s ION ITX motherboard. The casing sports UV green acrylic sheets, lit by 4 cathode lights and placed on a pedestal that will allow it to rotate a whole 360 degrees. The PC also sports an x64 SSD by Corsair, 4GB RAM, and a 90-watt pico power supply. You can check out more details on this mod at the Casemod Blog.

NVIDIA Tegra 2 could double its speed

Posted on November 6, 2009 6:04 AM

Word has it that the NVIDIA's Tegra 2 mobile processor could probably double the performance of its predecessor when it rolls out next year, thanks to the switch to the newer ARM9 architecture. Assuming it combines well with the graphics core, the updated Tegra 2 could be a force to be reckoned with. As it is, current Tegra chips are already capable of 720p HD video playback, while untapped variants can already handle 1080p with aplomb. Guess mobile devices are going to get a whole lot more exciting in time to come.

NVIDIA CEO Unsurprised By Intel Lawsuit

Posted on November 6, 2009 3:26 AM

It seems that NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang isn't too surprised over the allegations by New York's attorney general that Intel has illegally tried to maintain its monopoly.; That being said, he reminds us that NVIDIA have far superior products to Intel, and that people are busy buying their graphics processors. NVIDIA is in a rather uncomfortable position, as it's locked in a legal battle with Intel, preventing NVIDIA from making chipsets from Intel's Core i series of chips. Has Intel been maintaining its monopoly via illegal means? What do you think?

EVGA GTX 275 Co-op PhysX card

Posted on November 3, 2009 9:00 AM

The EVGA GTX 275 Co-op PhysX card is very different from the rest as it will boast a GTX 275 that will hook up with a GTS 250 GPU on a single board, enabling the former to handle all graphics rendering while the latter does PhysX calculations. You will get a grand total of 1,280MB of memory between both GPUs for a total bandwidth of 179.8GB/sec. This looks like a sole release from EVGA with nothing similar to roll out in the future, and it will cost north of $300 when released.

Intel To Offer Larrabee At Preferential Prices?

Posted on November 3, 2009 7:15 AM

If you’re interested in computer graphics, you’ll certainly have heard of Intel’s upcoming high-end Larrabee GPU. Sources online claim that Intel is planning to offer preferential pricing for the GPU on its own, as well as bundled with other Intel products. Scheduled to be launched in 2010, Larrabee will most likely directly compete with NVIDIA’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon graphic cards. Will Larrabee put genuine pressure on NVIDIA and AMD/ATI, or will it still be a two horse race?

NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 On Nov 17th

Posted on November 1, 2009 3:09 AM

It’s nearly Christmas, and many folks will be looking forward to a graphics card upgrade, fortunately NVIDIA won’t make us wait until Christmas though, as its GeForce GT 240 graphics card is said to be launching on November 17th. While it won’t support DirectX 11, it’s based on the 40nm fabrication process, sporting 96 cores, 900MHz GDDR3 and support for PhysX. There isn’t any word on pricing just yet, but it should be replacing the GeForce 9600, so that should give you a rough indication of its price point.

Nvidia Fermi Ray-Tracing Demo (+video)

Posted on October 30, 2009 9:28 AM

A Chinese website (PCzilla) has published images of what appears to be a ray-tracing demo for the upcoming graphics processor codenamed Fermi (a.k.a GeForce GT300). The image with the room (see extended post) is done with Mental Ray and is probably a CUDA demo. I'm not sure what the deal is with the two faces (including this one above). I suspect that they are also part of a general purpose computing demo that accelerates ray-tracing. I don’t say that because it looks "too good to be real-time”, but because supercomputing seems to be the overall theme here. You would be surprised to see what can be done in real-time with a static face.

Nvidia Ion 2 chipset coming out late this year?

Posted on October 28, 2009 9:45 AM

A wild rumor about an upcoming release of an Nvidia Ion 2 chipset has surfaced on the web. Q4 2009 seems like a weird date to launch a product, but February is typically a “refresh” time for the PC industry, so samples must be out there already if that was true. In any case, the rumored performance would be 2X the graphics speed of the current Ion chipset. Ion is also known as the GeForce 9400M and is found in a number of laptops (like the Macbook Pro) or netbooks. It works with Core 2 or Atom Intel processors. For now, I'll assume that the thermal envelope and power requirements are similar to the first ION chip. Of course, that's just a rumor.

NVIDIA iRay, RealityServer

Posted on October 20, 2009 2:33 PM

NVIDIA has just announced a 3D cloud infrastructure initiative this morning. The idea is to render incredibly realistic graphics for a number of applications (home design, architecture, product design….) in the cloud and send the images back as a movie stream or most likely a single frame (rendering preview happens in seconds, instead of hours) to a client that has little or no 3D capabilities. The dataset, typically too large to reside on the client, would live remotely on the RealityServer, a solution that NVIDIA has been pushing for some time now.

Overall, I liked the idea and the applications looked like they could work in the real world. From Home Design to Computer Assisted Design (CAD), iRay could bring value to those who use Mental Ray (a bunch of people) for offline rendering. Keep in mind that there is probably an initial data upload time that could be considerable, depending on the project. This could be a turn-off for anyone who updates a few big files during each iteration, as the upload might outlast the rendering time.

NVIDIA postpones chipset development for Intel Nehalem processors

Posted on October 8, 2009 11:49 PM

NVIDIA has stepped on the brakes when it comes to developing chipsets for Intel's Nehalem-class processors, at least until there is a clear outcome of a legal dispute over the two companies' licensing agreement. It is widely believed that the issue will be settled sometime next year, and a blip like this will not see NVIDIA stop support for and selling their existing chipsets for processors based on Intel's older Frontside Bus (FSB) architecture, which will also comprise of the Ion graphics platform for Intel Atom-based netbooks and nettops.

NVIDIA Fermi-based Cards Coming Soon

Posted on October 3, 2009 7:31 AM

If the recent news of NVIDIA’s GT300 wasn’t enough to get ATI sweating, it looks like the latest tidbit that NVIDIA will be launching three Fermi-based graphics cards, all supporting DirectX 11, should really give ATI a heart attack. The first of the three cards is reportedly a single chip graphics card with 16 clusters and 512 shader cores; the second a dual-GPU version of the same card, but with less than 2x 512 shader cores; the last will certainly be a high performance card, aimed at competing directly with ATI’s Radeon HD5850. The official announcement should be out before we see 2010, and notebooks with Fermi-based cards should appear sometime in 2010, which certainly isn’t too far away.

Lenovo IdeaCenter Q110 Now On Sale

Posted on September 27, 2009 8:15 AM

It looks like Lenovo’s Q110 nettop has gone on sale and is currently going for $399 with 2GB RAM and a 160GB hard drive. It currently comes with Windows Vista Home Premium, but we suspect that a lot of folks will want to wait a few weeks to get it with Windows 7 pre-loaded, what with all the hype of Windows 7. It’s really interesting to see how well folks have taken to these low-powered and low-cost computers, which all started off with Asus’ Eee PC.

Nvidia GeForce GT300 Coming This Year

Posted on September 26, 2009 12:04 AM

AMD might be enjoying the current position of its Radeon HD 5800 as the world’s only DirectX 11 supporting graphics card series, but it seems that NVIDIA is gearing up to release its GeForce GT300, the first NVIDIA graphics card to support DirextX 11, on 27th Nov. Even if schedules are delayed, it would probably be pushed back to December, which certain isn’t the end of the world. The graphics card battle certainly looks like it’s going to heat up again.

Lucid offers a multi-GPU alternative to SLI and CrossFire

Posted on September 23, 2009 2:06 AM

[IDF 2009, SF] Lucid's Hydra Engine is a hardware solution (a chip) that brings multi-GPU functionality to motherboards, without having to use Nvidia's SLI or AMD's CrossFire. Usually, there is a lot of work done in the GPU driver, but Lucid has found a way to use many GPUs without asking Nvidia or AMD for help.

They declined to give me all the details (even though they have 50 patents or so filed), but they said that the high-level idea is that objects from the scene are routed and rendered on different GPUs. We're talking about individual geometry elements here, not tiles or frames. Somehow, Lucid manages to re-assemble a final image that looks just like one that has been rendered on a single-GPU system.

Tegra-powered Samsung M1 unboxing video

Posted on September 3, 2009 10:36 AM

We've known that Samsung was going to announce the M1 media player "outside of Korea" and that's exactly what they did in Germany at IFA. Here's an unboxing video that shows the device in action. As of now, I don't know if there's a public SDK or support for OpenGL (I'd say yes). That said, the device probably runs Windows CE and supports a flavor of mobile DirectX. What we do know is that the 2D speed is really good and that the video playback is impeccable on the amazing AMOLED display. Check it out.

Is NVIDIA's Tegra the platform for Apple's Tablet?

Posted on August 24, 2009 10:53 AM

Nvidia's Mike Rayfield has confirmed that his company is working with an unnamed partner on a Tegra-powered "Media Pad". A Media pad is defined by Mike Rayfield as being a touch tablet ranging from 7-13 inches in size, with 3G capability.

So here's the burning question: is Nvidia in the rumored Apple Tablet? Quite frankly, nobody knows, but it seems surprising to me that an official from the company would even remotely say something that would hint at an upcoming Apple product. Usually Apple's suppliers are scared to death about unintentionally leaking something out.

Would it make sense for Apple to use Nvidia's platform? Yes, because the iPhone's platform might not have the horsepower to drive a much larger display. Ideally, Apple might try to make something that is binary-compatible with the iPod Touch (but faster). It might have been working on its own faster SoC (system on a chip) based on a PowerVR design. With a larger device, Apple has a lot more room for thermal management and could crank up the speed. That said, anything is possible.

The Samsung M1 has an Nvidia Tegra too

Posted on August 3, 2009 2:45 PM

Without the Samsung M1, The Zune HD might have been proclaimed the most powerful 3D handheld device in the known universe, but it's not out yet and it looks like Samsung has the Tegra mojo too. My Korean skills are very low, but so far we know that there's a 3.3" AMOLED display, a digital TV tuner (DMB). Despite the initial excitement around the hardware, what's important is to know what the software is.

We wonder if this device runs on some Windows CE variant, or if it is a proprietary OS (that would be surprising, but who knows?). The software will make or break this device. At the moment, we're tempted to think that the Zune HD will have a better eco-system. [dapreview, Samsung]

CPU against GPU in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Posted on July 28, 2009 3:26 PM

WSJ's Don Clark has written an interesting article about how GPUs (graphics processing unit) and CPUs (central processing unit) are competing to be the top processor in Hollywood's Computer Graphics (CG) business. In "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", ILM used GPUs to compute a fire effect*. This is quite a milestone for an industry typically dominated by CPU farms.

While there is indeed a nascent competition between both types of chips, the reality is that in the short-term, both chips will be used for different things. Sorry, look elsewhere for drama! CPUs are largely ahead in terms of utilization, as they benefit from a huge software legacy. On the other end GPUs can process particular datasets like particles and other parallel-friendly problems orders of magnitude faster... but only if the data can fit in the GPU-accessible memory.

Viewsonic VOT130 Nettop Hands-On

Posted on July 28, 2009 11:07 AM

You remember that Viewsonic had launched a bunch of Atom-based computers? Well, here's a hands-on video of the VOT130, courtesy of netbooknews.com. This particular Nettop should be capable of playing HD content... that's certainly smaller than my current living room PC, but can it record TV? No.