At the nVidia Analysts’ day yesterday nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang talked up the advantages of GPU computing. This is nothing big as it has been something the nVidia has been talking about for the last couple of years.

After AMD was first to demo this technology nVidia leapt ahead of AMD and has been spearheading the GP-GPU. Huang claims that Apple is an indicator of the future with Apple’s new support for OpenCL in Snow Leopard offloading some computing functions to the GPU.

But while this is nothing new what was interesting is the comment by Huang that Tegra (nVidia’s ARM based SoC) could become half of the company’s business. This comment would seem to indicate that nVidia is moving away from being a graphics company.

nVidia recently scored a rather big win by getting Tegra into the upcoming Zune HD.

Read more here.

Huang also addressed its Tegra chip, which is an ARM-based design that integrates an Nvidia GeForce processor. Tegra is targeted at smartphones and Netbooks. Responding to a question from an analyst, he said that in a few years Tegra may represent half of its business, with the rest divided up between the professional (Tesla, Quadro) and the consumer GeForce markets.

Huang also repeated his assertion that Intel is using pricing–what he called “subsidies”–and “MDF” (market development funds) to prevent Nvidia from selling more of it Ion processors to customers. He claimed the success of the Ion processor would be two to three times greater without Intel interference.

via. TweakTown.com

With the announcement at Computex that AMD has working DX11 silicone we started to wonder if nVidia would have a comeback of its own but so far we only hear rumors of the GT300 in late 2009 or early 2010.

In fact the first 40nm GPUs from the green team will only be DX10.1. This is sort of odd as for years nVidia has claimed there was no advantage to using the DX stopgap. They have held firm that they were going to wait until DX11 to make the move.

But as of this writing the GT216 and GT218 will be DX10.1 parts. For all of the nVidia fans out there, it looks like you will have to wait on the GT300 for your DX11 gaming fix. But then again, as of this writing there are no DX11 games on the shelves and Windows 7 is still in the RC stage.

Read more here.

ATI has been preaching that DirectX 10.1 is a good thing for years now and Nvidia jumping on the DirectX 10.1 bandwagon just months before Microsoft is set to reveal DirectX 11 is quite strange. Nvidia was a very opponent of DirectX 10.1 since all of its currently shipping generation doesn’t have support for DirectX 10.1 and all the sudden, they are announcing a new generation that will completely support DirectX 10.1

Since mobile and desktop chips from both Nvidia and ATI are usually the same thing, Nvidia wanted to offer DirectX 10.1 check box technology to its potential users and with Calpella, Intel’s Nehalem – Clarksfield quad core for notebooks platform. Nvidia expects many Calpella design wins for its 40nm DirectX 10.1 GPUs and most probably Nvidia customers simply wanted to have DirectX 10.1 and not DirectX 10, something that Nvidia offers for years.

via. TweakTown.com

Just this morning I posed a question about the use of the Tegra SoC chip in netbooks. Well the question still stands but the gang over at Engadget has an interesting piece that comes to them from TechVideoBlog. It seems they have a video showing Tegra pumping out some 720p HD content without breaking a sweat.

My issue with Tegra follows in the OS choices and other performance. Right now the only operating systems that Tegra is being used with are Windows CE (which is awful) and Android. The other factor is system performance, it is being reported that you can only have about four tabs of Firefox open before the system slows down. To me in a machine designed for internet usage that is just not enough.

Maybe if nVidia pushes this into portable HD media players it will fit. But in reality HD video on my netbook is not something I can get worked up about.

Read more here.

If you didn’t believe the Tegra hype — 25 days audio, 10 hours of 1080p video on single charge — already then pull up a stool, son, NVIDIA wants to tell your a story. TechVideoBlog sat down with Gordon Grigor, NVIDIA’s Director of Mobile Software to see Tegra’s little Atom smasher in action. So sit back while Gordon smoothly streams a 720p MSN HD trailer off the web (over WiFi) then switches over to Firefox to take Flash for a spin at full-screen. Gordon also clarifies earlier confusion over Tegra’s ability to handle HD video; see, the Tegra 600 can do H.264 video at 720p while the Tegra 650 can decode 1080p. Gordon also gives some more insight into memory configurations.

via. TweakTown.com

Asus is entering the Ion market; and they are doing it in a very smart way. Not wanting to put the more expensive Ion into the common netbook (either due to Intel pressure of just for plain common sense) Asus is using the fact that Ion now supports the Celerons family as well as the Ion.

The new mainboard featuring Ion and a possible Celeron 220 was spotted by the gang over at Fudzilla. We talked to Asus about the Ion when it was first announced and nVidia wanted to stuff it into netbooks. Although Asus declined to comment on Ion at the time, we had the feeling they were not discounting it altogether.

Traditionally Ion would be for Atom only but at Computex nVidia announced that the Ion would support additional CPUs as well as Ion. This is in line with nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s statement that the MCP79/GeForce 9400 is the same thing as Ion.

The new product would be a great fit into a nettop or an HTPC as the Ion does have better video playback than Intel’s offering plus the nice ability to push out HD quality video at 1080p

Read more here.

Asus has been showing off its ION-based C2N7A-I ITX motherboard, and we’ve come across some conflicting information. ION platforms have Atom CPUs, of course, and without them they’re just plain MCP79 or Geforce 9400 chipsets, and it would seem unlikely that Asus would call its board ION if it wasn’t one.

Unfortunately, the cooling solution suggests there’s no Atom in this combination and we’ve heard that this board will actually run Celeron 220, which would automatically cancel out ION branding. However, this might be just plain speculation, as Nvidia wouldn’t allow for ION branding on a non-Atom platform.

via. TweakTown.com

Intel’s Nehalem architecture might have generated a lot of excitement and rave reviews, but it turns out that Nvidia isn’t that impressed with its impact on gaming performance. In fact, yesterday the company described Intel’s claims about Core i7’s gaming performance as “disingenuous” in a presentation to introduce Nvidia’s concept of an optimised gaming PC.

In the presentation, Nvidia’s technical marketing director Tom Petersen said “I have a copy of Intel’s latest deck that they share with press and customers, and on there they have a slide that is called The Intel Core i7 920 Processor, where they claim that gaming performance goes up by 80 percent when you use a Core i7. Now, I was impressed by that claim, and I was trying to figure out how they could possibly say such a thing, and it turns out that Intel is basing that claim on only 3DMark Vantage’s CPU test.”

As Petersen points out, this test “is designed to show CPU difference, it doesn’t actually measure gameplay, it doesn’t actually measure anything about game performance. Sure enough, if you do that test you will see Core i7 running faster, but I think it’s a little disingenuous to call that game performance.”

To prove his point, Petersen outlined two types of PC, which he likened to cars – the Hummer and the Beamer. Petersen described the Hummer, saying that it “has got to be big, and it’s got to be expensive and of course it’s infused with Hafnium, which is kind of a dig at Intel. It has a Core i7, which is Intel’s latest, greatest CPU that they claim is the best for gaming.” The Hummer features a Core i7, 4GB of RAM, an X58 motherboard and a single GeForce GTS 250. Meanwhile, the Beamer swaps out the Core i7 CPU for a basic Core 2 Duo E8400, an nForce 750i motherboard and a pair of GeForce GTS 250 cards in SLI.

The cost difference between the two is massive, with a Core i7 965-based Hummer costing $1,501 US based on pricing from US etailer Newegg, and the Beamer costing just $715 US. Petersen also noted that even a Core i7 920 setup with a single GeForce GTS 250 would still cost more than the Beamer SLI rig at around $790 US. The prices were based on the core components only, and didn’t include features such as the case or PSU.

“You’re paying a pretty dear price to follow the Intel story of how to build the fastest PC for gaming”, said Petersen, as he showed a graph of how gaming performance scales with CPU upgrades. Petersen got his test results by adding together the frame rates from Crysis Warhead, Fallout 3, Call of Duty: World at War and Far Cry 2 at 1,920 x 1,200 (no AA or AF) and taking an average. With a Core 2 Duo E8400 and a GeForce GTS 250, the average was 41.6fps.

He then showed how this increased as you upgraded the CPU (the blue line in the graph above), and compared it to how the frame rate increased when you added another graphics card in SLI. The frame rate only increased to 42.4fps after upgrading to a Core i7 965, but jumped all the way up to 59.4fps after upgrading to a GeForce GTX 260 (216 stream processors) SLI setup.

This might seem obvious to those of us who know about how 3D acceleration works, but Petersen claims that the result is still “surprising to most people”. Petersen says that “it is a fact, that when you’re gaming and you’re running at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 or better, the Core 2 Duo is perfect for running all of today’s games. In real gaming, there’s no difference between a Core i7 and a Core 2 Duo.”

Petersen accepts that some gamers want the very best of everything, and likens the combination of a Core i7 and SLI graphics to a Ferrari. “If you’ve got money to burn, and you want to get the latest Core i7, and you want to get great graphics cards, then sure you can get the best of everything. There is some small benefit to having a Core i7 965 over a Core 2 Duo when you’re buying the best graphics cards and running at the highest resolutions, so a Core i7 has a place and it does have a benefit in what I’m going to call the Ferrari configuration. But the truth is that when you’re trading off money, there’s nothing like the Beamer configuration.”

“Particularly in today’s economic climate, people are concerned about getting the most value for their money,” says Petersen. As such, Petersen advises PC gamers to ignore Core i7 and instead set up a Core 2 Duo system using an nForce SLI motherboard. “With the leftover $800 I can go out and buy 16 games,” says Petersen, “it’s not even close.”

Is Nvidia just stating the obvious here, or do you think the general PC gamer thinks that they’ll get a big boost in gaming performance from a Core i7 CPU? Would you rather have a Core i7 system with one GPU, or a Core 2 Duo system with an SLI setup? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.

SOURCE

It is rumored that NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 300 new flagship graphics card won’t arrive until October this year, a source leak with one of NVIDIA’s partners may have hinted to this . They tell the Inquirer that the first actual production models will be ready October 15th following a tape out, or a first submission for manufacturing, in June.

Whether or not NVIDIA will make its target is nonetheless called into question. The company is likely to have the first revision of fully testable silicon on August 1st but may take as much as 3 months after testing to manufacture enough for the first batch, putting an actual release in mid-November at the soonest. Any need to significantly revise the card would likely push the actual release further.

GT 300’s feature set hasn’t been leaked, though it makes sense to bring support for DirectX 11, OpenCL and newer OpenGL and will likely use NVIDIA’s version of 40 nanometer manufacturing to improve performance and reduce heat versus today’s 55nm parts.

via. Guru3D

Nvidia has refreshed nearly its entire Quadro line with a handful of new cards fit for the those who use GPUs for work instead of play.

Pairing up with the new Intel Xeon chips based on the Nehalem architecture are five new Quadro products. Nvidia actually lists seven Quadros as being new, but the FX 5800 and FX 4800 have occupied the stratosphere since late last year with onboard memory and prices that rival entire gaming rigs.

New, and definitely more economical for the non-heavy industrial user are the FX 3800 ($900), FX 1800 ($600), FX 580 ($150), FX 380 ($100) and NVS 295 ($100).

Perhaps even more significant is Nvidia’s introduction of SLI Multi-OS, which enables use of multiple Quadro GPUs from a single graphics workstation in a virtualized environment.

“In today’s economy, organizations are turning to virtualization to increase productivity and maximize cost savings,” says Jeff Brown, general manager of professional solutions at Nvidia. “Now professionals working with visualization applications can benefit from virtualization.”

SLI Multi-OS is available on the Quadro FX 4800, FX 5800 and the new FX 3800. According to Nvidia, SLI Multi-OS works in association with Parallels Workstation Extreme virtualization software and Intel’s VT-d technology, assigning both the host and guest virtual machine its own dedicated GPU.

The new Quadro cards are available now from PNY Technologies, Leadtek and Elsa and systems from Dell, Fujistu-Siemens, HP and Lenovo.

via. Tom’s Hardware

We have a new NVIDIA GeForce driver available for you today. This in fact is a new Beta driver for GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, and 200-series desktop GPUs, and should be pretty darn good (!).

New in Release 182.46:

• Optimized single GPU and SLI support for upcoming PC games.
• Numerous bug fixes. Refer to the release documentation notes.
• Users without US English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver here.

New in Release 182 Drivers:

• Boosts performance in several 3D applications. The following are examples of improvements measured with Release 182 WHQL drivers vs. Release 181.22 WHQL drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):
  • Up to 8% performance increase in Fallout 3 at high resolution and AA.
  • Up to 10% performance increase in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.
  • Up to 9% performance increase in Half-Life 2 at high resolution with AA.
  • Up to 11% performance increase in Left 4 Dead at high resolution with AA.
  • Up to 10% performance increase in Race Driver: GRID at high resolution and AA.
• Includes full support for OpenGL 3.0 on GeForce 8-series, 9-series, and 200-series GPUs.
• Automatically installs the new PhysX System Software version 9.09.0203.

Existing Support:

• Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI technology on DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and OpenGL, including 3-way SLI, Quad SLI, and SLI support on SLI-certified Intel X58-based motherboards.
• Supports NVIDIA SLI Multi-monitor support, giving you the ability to use two monitors with your GeForce graphics cards in SLI mode.
• Supports NVIDIA PhysX acceleration on a dedicated GeForce graphics card. Use one card for graphics and dedicate a different card for PhysX processing for game-changing physical effects.  Note: GPU PhysX is supported on all GeForce 8-series, 9-series and 200-series GPUs with a minimum of 256MB dedicated graphics memory.

Download:

Forceware 182.46 XP 32-bit
Forceware 182.46 XP 64-bit
Forceware 182.46 Vista 64-bit
Forceware 182.46 Vista 32-bit

via. Guru3D.com