Hasta La Gadget!

Yesterday was Pi Day, and to celebrate the yearly occasion, you no doubt tried your hardest to recite Pi to as many decimal places as you could. Of course, most of us probably couldn’t get past the first few decimal places, but there was one person who could, thanks to a set of computers powered by a handful of NVIDIA graphics cards.

Santa Clara University researcher Ed Karrels ended up breaking the world record for computing digits of Pi to eight quadrillion places to the right of the decimal point. Karrels used graphics cards to do the work rather than CPUs, and he spread the work across three different computers: one with four NVIDIA GTX 690 cards, one with two NVIDIA GTX 680 cards, and 24 computers at the Santa Clara University Design Center with one NVIDIA GTX 570 card each.

The calculation took 35 days to complete, from December 19 to January 22, beating out the previous held by a team at Yahoo, who used 1,000 CPU-only computers, which took 23 days to compute Pi to two-quadrillion places, just a quarter of what Karrels’s setup achieved. After the 35-day run, Karrels conducted a second run to double-check the math, which took just 26 days using newer versions of his programming tools.

Karrels will speak at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California next Tuesday, where he’ll be explaining the math behind the Pi calculation achievement, as well as the programming tricks he used, as well as the logistics of conducting supercomputing tasks on a budget.

NVIDIA-powered computers break Pi calculation record is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Heads up, folks. NVIDIA will be invading the PS4 as the company has announced PhysX and APEX support for the recently-announced gaming console. Both PhysX and APEX are software development kits from NVIDIA that will allow game developers to design new PS4 games with stunning graphics, similar to what we saw during the PS4 reveal last month.

NVIDIA’s product manager for PhysX, Mike Skolones, says that “great physics technology is essential for delivering a better gaming experience and multiplatform support is critical for developers,” and “with PhysX and APEX support for PlayStation 4, customers can look forward to better games.” Indeed, both PhysX and APEX should make games more realistic with life-like movements and scenery.

PhysX is designed specifically to be used with hardware acceleration in processors and graphics cards, and the technology allows for more complex and detailed worlds in video games, including more-realistic explosions, clothes that react more naturally to the wind and body movements, and of course, better life-like motions of characters.

Both PhysX and APEX are already integrated into a handful of games. NVIDIA boasts that PhysX alone is featured in more than 150 games, and is used by over 10,000 developers. Some games that are taking advantage of NVIDIA’s technologies include Borderlands 2, the Batman Arkham series, Mirror’s Edge, and Metro 2033.

NVIDIA announces PhysX and APEX support for PS4 is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

When you want workstation performance and reliability out of your computer, you usually have to pony up over a grand for a high-end graphics card. However, NVIDIA has released four new Quadro graphics cards that come in many different flavors, including one option called the K600 that costs only $199.

The other three Kepler-based Quadro cards are the K4000, K2000, and the K2000D. The K4000 is the beast of the bunch, racking up 3GB of on-board memory and costing a whopping $1,269. The K2000 and K2000D are similar to one another, both of which are priced at $599 and come with 2GB of onboard memory, but the K2000D comes with native support for two dual-link DVI display connectors, which NVIDIA says is ideal for “interfacing with ultra-high-resolution medical imaging displays.”

Furthermore, the K4000 has 768 CUDA Cores, a memory bandwidth of 134 GB/s,and 1.246 teraflops. The K2000 has 384 CUDA Cores, 67 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and 733 gigaflops. The budget card of the bunch, K600 isn’t as fast, but for the money you’re paying, it’s not a bad deal. You’re looking at 192 CUDA Cores, a memory bandwidth of 29 GB/s, and 336 gigaflops.

Currently, the Quadro K5000 is the flagship card of the series, but for those who don’t need that much power out of their rig, you can grab cheaper versions that may be suited for more your speed. NVIDIA says these new cards deliver twice as much performance as previous-generation cards, and features larger and faster on-board memory to keep your graphics-intensive projects going strong.

NVIDIA’s new Quadro cards offer workstation performance for as low as $199 is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

NVIDIA never skimps on offering constant driver updates to its various graphics cards, and today the company released beta drivers that are optimized for the many games coming out this month, including SimCity, StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, Resident Evil 6, and Hawken PhysX just to name a few.

Version 314.14 brings optimization for upcoming games, as well as current games that could use a boost. Specifically, the new beta drivers deliver up to a 23% boost in Sniper Elite V2 and a 9% boost in Sleeping Dogs. In SLI mode, other games also get an increase in performance, including a 9% boost in StarCraft II and a 5% boost in Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

Today’s update comes just a couple weeks after NVIDIA unleashed version 314.07 of its GeForce drivers, which increases performance for a handful of intensive games, such as Crysis 3, Assassin’s Creed III, Civilization V, and Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Crysis 3 ended up with a 65% boost in performance, which is quite the improvement.

Other games that NVIDIA focused on for these beta drivers are Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Just Cause 2, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Batman: Arkham City, all of which received 4% to 5% performance boosts. If you already have the GeForce Experience installed, the drivers are available for automatic downloading and installing right now.

NVIDIA GeForce 314.14 beta drivers available now is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It’s time for the NVIDIA GRID processor project to fire up and bring on the first-ever reference architecture for cloud gaming, straight from Agawi in the form of what’s being called “True Cloud.” This reference architecture is being called a “seamless” integration of hardware, servers, and service providers in an effort to create a cloud gaming universe like we’ve never seen before. Agawi’s own executive chairman Peter Relan unveiled this system today in what the company says is the first industry-wide solution for the terribly fragmented cloud ecosystem we’re working with today.

Today’s announcement has NVIDIA backing Agawi True Cloud with no less than their own NVIDIA GRID processor system. Also joining in on the fun are PEER 1, Blue Box, and XO Communications, all joining together to bring developers an opportunity to “build games ONCE and offer any game, anywhere, instantly.” Quite the miraculous feat they’re attempting here as NVIDIA’s Project SHIELD nears reality as well.

When we first heard of NVIDIA GRID, it was a mind-bending experience to think about the possibilities inside. As Phil Eisler, general manager of NVIDIA GRID cloud gaming at NVIDIA speaks about this week, GRID K340 servers are one of the jumping-off points for the public’s understanding of what it means to work with 12 GPUs (in each server) as they usher in “the smooth, seamless interactive experience of a high-performing gaming PC on mobile devices”.

One of the most important points of this announcement is the fact that True Cloud architecture will, as Agawi promises, “eliminate heavy data storage and costs” for cloud gaming. With True Cloud, game publishers will be able to stream their games “from social to mid-core to AAA” in a much more affordable environment than any solution available before.

Agawi True Cloud teams with NVIDIA GRID for one-stop cloud gaming is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.