Hasta La Gadget!

Google’s N-Gram Viewer is a wonderful and under-appreciated thing: At the click of a mouse, it lets you search Google Books’ huge corpus of material for specific words and combinations of words. This N-Gram analysis, for example, maps the mention of ten different cities in every book written between 1800 and 2000, charting the wax and wane of famous metropolises in the popular consciousness.

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The MacBook Air’s integrated graphics all but rule it out as a serious gaming machine. However, Larry Gadea at the Tech Inferno forums has found a way to make the Air a powerhouse through an ad hoc external GPU. His design mates a PCI Express video card to the Mac’s Thunderbolt port through a combination of two adapters, a Boot Camp installation of Windows 7 and third-party software. The performance improvement is appropriately dramatic, leading to frame rates up to seven times faster than what Intel’s HD 5000 can manage. Just don’t expect to buy a pre-assembled version anytime soon — the peripheral needs a desktop-class power supply just to run, and Intel won’t issue the licenses needed to commercialize Thunderbolt GPUs. If you’re absolutely determined to get a Crysis-worthy ultraportable, though, you’ll find Gadea’s instructions at the source link.

Filed under: Gaming, Laptops, Peripherals, Apple, NVIDIA

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Via: MacRumors

Source: Tech Inferno

This week NVIDIA is once again blurring the lines between desktop and mobile graphics with a note on the introduction of Kepler technology into their next-generation mobile processor. NVIDIA suggests that, “from a graphics perspective, this is as big a milestone for mobile as the first GPU, GeForce 256, was for the PC when it was introduced 14 years ago.” This is the first set of details we’re getting on Project Logan, the next processor architecture in the Tegra chipset family.

You’ll remember the comic book character collection of code-names for the processors that’ve become the Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 – and what we must assume will be the Tegra 5 as well. Here with what’s still called Project Logan, NVIDIA makes clear their intent to bring graphics processing abilities until now reserved for desktop machines to the mobile realm; for tablets, smartphones, and everything in between.

In addition to deploying Kepler’s efficient processing powers to the Logan mobile SoC, NVIDIA intents on bringing the excellence in a form that the company will be able to license to others. This licensing was outlined earlier this year amid the latest Kepler integrations into GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760.

NVIDIA suggests that the technology deployed with mobile Kepler is able to use one-third the power of “GPUs in leading tablets, such as the retinal iPad”, while it performs identical renderings. They also note that this efficiency is achieved with mobile Kepler without compromising graphics capabilities, working with OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenGL 4.4, and everything else in the OpenGL universe.

Though we’re expecting this architecture to hit Google’s Android – as NVIDIA has been hitting for the past several years – they do mention that the technology also supports DirectX, the latest graphics API from Microsoft. Think Windows RT and Windows 8 – NVIDIA’s been there before.

Working with these current and next-generation APIs allow NVIDIA to bring on graphics unlike any seen in the mobile universe, developers taking hold of these environments with a variety of high-end rendering and simulation techniques. NVIDIA runs down three of the most powerful:

Tessellation – which creates geometry dynamically and efficiently on the GPU from high-level descriptions, sizing triangles optimally based on the user’s viewpoint. By comparison, fine detail in a traditional pre-generated approach is inefficient, requiring excess geometry to deal with all possible viewpoints.

Compute-based deferred rendering – which calculates the effect of all lights in the scene in a single deferred rendering pass. This OpenGL 4 capability greatly improves deferred rendering efficiency and scalability compared to current OpenGL ES based implementations, which require an extra pass for each light source in the scene. The scalability of the compute-based approach paves the way to even more advanced lighting models, such as using virtual points of lights to approximate global illumination effects.

Advanced anti-aliasing and post-processing – which deliver better image quality, particularly in areas of very sharp color contrast, by making multi-sampling more programmable and allowing applications to implement their own anti-aliasing filters. These also enable more efficient film-quality post-processing effects, such as motion blur and depth of field.

NVIDIA makes clear that a lovely collection of processing-heavy tasks will be able to be carried out with this next-generation solution including computer vision, augmented reality, computational imaging, and speech recognition. Showed off this week at Siggraph was a return of the digital head now known as “Ira”, aka Faceworks.

Stick around as we continue to jump deeper into the next big superhero-themed processor, one that’ll break barriers beyond what we’re only just seeing now with the NVIDIA Tegra 4 – living inside NVIDIA SHIELD and getting pumped up for benchmarks sooner than later!

VIA: NVIDIA

NVIDIA Project Logan processor assimilates Kepler mobile is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

At the SIGGRAPH conference going on this week, Nvidia has made a potentially huge announcement regarding the future of mobile gaming: the company is bringing its Kepler graphics architecture to mobile devices via its Project Logan next-gen mobile processor. Nvidia compares this development to the rollout of the first GPU, the GeForce 256, 14 years ago. Logan as a platform, with its Kepler GPU, jumps mobile computing ahead by the equivalent of seven years’ worth of advancement, says Nvidia.

Mobile devices haven’t had GPUs available with true, full desktop feature set support before now, Nvidia says. That includes things like better rendering and simulation techniques, like tessellation, advanced physics and anti-aliasing and the ability to calculate lighting effect rendering in a single pass. All of which is pretty technical, but ultimately means that a lot of the tricks and capabilities available to console gaming will now be brought to mobile devices.

Kepler is already in use in desktop GPUs, and in Nvidia’s desktop designs it can take on general purpose computing as well to help with the processing workload even when you’re not playing Call of Duty. Kepler on mobile can also offer this, which means that mobile apps featuring things like computational imaging, computer vision, AR or speech recognition would be able to benefit from the Kepler GPU and take advantage not only of its processing power, but also its power efficiency.

To demonstrate Kepler’s power, Nvidia released a video which showed a realistic human head model being generated in real-time. The demo itself isn’t new – it was shown off earlier this year on a desktop PC using Kepler. But this time around, the mobile Logan processor with Kepler is powering the rendering, which makes this a pretty stark proof of the kind of effect that Kepler could have on the state of mobile gaming, and mobile computing overall.

Many believe that mobile and desktop gaming are not on a collision course – each will have its place, and serve different functions owing to different graphics capabilities, control schemes and more. But with Kepler, Nvidia is showing that it’s delivering the technology to enable a further blurring of the line between desktop and mobile, and delivering it well ahead of when some people thought that might happen.

This week at the annual computer graphics conference known as Siggraph, NVIDIA has let loose information on their next-generation NVIDIA QUADRO K6000. This is NVIDIA QUADRO release is the new most powerful graphics card on the market – so says NVIDIA, bringing the world’s largest graphics memory with 12GB onboard. This isn’t the sort of processing power you’ll be using for anything less than the most power-hungry tasks on the planet.

Faced with managing extremely large data sets and time constraints, NVIDIA is aiming to satisfy the most current demands of product creators everywhere from graphics-intensive big-screen films to car manufacturing. Showing examples in both Layout and Animation & Simulation, NVIDIA has made it clear: the memory capacity involved in the K6000 allows previews of scenes with a much more final vision than has ever been offered before.

“It’s going to allow artists to preview their scenes much earlier in the pipeline. In this case, with the K6000, it’s all interactive.” – NVIDIA

“The added memory and other features allow our artists to see much more of the final scene in a real-time, interactive form, and allow many more artistic iterations.” – Guido Quaroni, Supervising Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios

In car manufacturing, NVIDIA aims to push reality-based design processes to a new generation as well – time restraints and massive amounts of data are needed here as well. Especially when full-on reality-based previews of vehicle renders are needed to avoid costly mistakes once the manufacturing process begins.

“I am now able to load nearly complete vehicle models into RTT Deltagen and have stunning photorealism almost instantly. Instead of spending significant time simplifying the models to fit into previous hardware, we can now spend more time reviewing and iterating designs up front which helps avoid costly changes to tooling.” – Dennis Malone, associate engineer, Nissan North America

The third of three places where NVIDIA aims to take command is with massive geological datasets. In the ecology survey universe, like the automotive world, users need to know what’s under the ground before they get there – the rendering of these possibilities is one of the most intense at this point in our collective history.

“Compared to the Quadro K5000, the Quadro K6000 tripled the performance when running jobs on Terraspark’s InsightEarth application. With jobs running in mere minutes, we can run more simulations and get better insight into where to drill. In this business, drilling in the wrong place is a multi-million dollar mistake, and the Quadro K6000 gives us the edge to make better decisions.” – Klaas Koster, manager, seismic interpretation, Apache Corporation

Sizemic exploration is what we’re looking at here. Faster simulation means faster imaging and faster analysis in the end.

The NVIDIA QUADRO K6000 will be available this Fall worldwide from both leading OEMs and resellers. If you’re aiming to bring on a massive display wall for broadcast-type applications or digital signage, you’ll be glad to see 2 DisplayPort 2.1 ports and 2 DVI ports on its back that can be run simultaneously.

• 12GB ultra-fast GDDR5 graphics memory lets designers and animators model and render characters and scenes at unprecedented scale, complexity and richness
• 2,880 streaming multiprocessor (SMX) cores deliver faster visualization and compute horsepower than previous-generation products
• Supports four simultaneous displays and up to 4k resolution with DisplayPort 1.2
• Ultra-low latency video I/O and support for large-scale visualizations

When pressed on how this product would continue to roll beside the gaming-aimed card family GeForce – specifically with cards such as the GTX TITAN, NVIDIA made it clear: these are two separate families, but they can co-exist as a friendly bunch.

“The Quadro family is targeted at professionals – while you can certainly play games, the real value is for professionals on a variety of verticals. For that Geophysicist that like to play Assassin’s Creed, could he have a good time doing that? Absolutely.” – NVIDIA

This unit will be available in, as NVIDIA says, an “October timeframe” from groups like Dell, HP, and Lenovo and with systems integrators like BOXX Technologies and Supermicro.

NVIDIA QUADRO K6000 becomes new world’s most powerful graphics card for professionals is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.