News Nvidia releases Graphics Plus Power Pack 3

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/04/06/nvidia-graphics-plus-power-pack-3/1

Nvidia releases the third power pack to show off its CUDA technology, which includes some PhysX goodies and the SETI@home client.

 

still no love for ATI...

 

If ATI had a good solution like CUDA to begin with they too would receive a lot of love. I know about their Streams technology but what has that been used with anyways? Or is it just the marketing engine that is NVIDIA that is better to push their own tech?

 

i've had this pack since 185.66. physX screensaver is cool to show off, but who would want it to eat away at your electricity bill when your computer is idling?

 

I thought they were more interested in supporting OpenCL via Stream. Nvidia seem more involved with their own tech (CUDA) than OpenCL. Though IIRC, Nvidia were considering porting PhsyX to run on OpenCL.

I'm fairly certain the Nvidia cards support OpenCL though.. I suppose as soon as OpenCL is accepted (and prevails over CUDA in Nvidia's eyes) there'll be a level playing field.

At the minute, it's all a bit 'me me me me' marketing.

 

i think nVidia has the better spin team of the two, hence CUDA's larger uptake. That and they mention CUDA and PhysX every bloody chance they get.

it would surely be possible to port the screen saver to Stream or OpenCL (or DX11 even), except you still need a physics solution that runs on the graphics cards somewhere (just because the screensaver's source code is available doesn't mean PhysX's is).

also, after a quick look at the .zip file, there are a couple of other things you need to mod the screensaver:
A purchased copy of DarkPHYSICS (download the Dark GDK Update - 26th November 2008)
A copy of MOLEBOX Pro (available from www.molebox.com)
so not so easy for others. Given that much of the provided source are the classes for each object type, and the code for running the screensaver itself, it's probably easier for some people to start from scratch (minus the physics api) in OpenCL or DX11 than gathering all the SDKs required for this screensaver.

 

I personally have tried the MotionDSP's vReveal and I would say that it's not that impressive. I've tried it on my desktop machine with a Pentium 4 631 @ 3.6 GHz (w/ HT) and a Geforce 8400 GS @ 650/1500/350 MHz (core/shader/mem respectively) and with GPU-acceleration, I only get about 2 fps, instead of 5-6 fps with CPU-only acceleration.

I'm quite unsatisfied with that result, I know that it's only a Geforce 8400 GS but I think it should be way faster than a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4. If we're looking at its specs, it was a cards with 16 SP clocked at 1.5 GHz each so it should be translated to about 24 GHz of raw processing power. I know it can't be calculated like that but well at least I'm trying.

But I do think that CUDA is a good way to stretch the power of our GPUs into other areas other than for gaming. And for that reasons is why I going to NVIDIA this time, after my 6 years with ATI. I hope ATI could catch up with NVIDIA and beat them for sure! I hope with the coming of DirectX 11, ATI could provide us the same functionality and versatility NVIDIA has offered.