Hasta La Gadget!

Should you happen to be playing the widely applauded BioShock Infinite game this week with a machine with the graphics power of NVIDIA’s GeForce under the hood, you’ll also find game-optimized drivers available to you for download. These drivers have ben sent out to the public along with notes about how they’ll destroy your concept of what looks best graphics-wise. If you thought this game looked great before, you’re in for a real trip.

NVIDIA is notorious for being up-to-date with the newest biggest baddest games on the market, releasing software for the graphics cards they’ve got out in the wild so that you can have the best experience you could possibly hope for. What we’re seeing with the NVIDIA GeForce family of GPUs here in 2013 is a big drive for NVIDIA-pushed optimization, especially with services such as the GeForce Experience. At the moment we’re seeing NVIDIA release a massive amount of information on this release specifically, showing the undeniable power of optimization on a variety of systems.

What you’re seeing here is the game being tested on four different resolutions and setups, each of them running on Rampage IV Extreme, i7-3960X clocked at 3.3GHz with 8GB of RAM under the hood. It should be mighty clear that you’ll want to update your drivers to GeForce 314.22 WHQL as quick as possible, even on GPUs not listed here.

NVIDIA has also shown the difference in performance for such games as the new Tomb Raider. You’ll find here that the change is just as impressive, changing the frames per second by levels of 10 with ease. These games are two in a collection of games the team has tested and optimized, with this particular driver update hitting the following:

In addition to the BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider optimizations, 314.22 WHQL also includes performance improvements for Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Borderlands 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Civilization V, Sleeping Dogs, Sniper Elite V2, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Good deal! You’ll find this update available to you today in an over-the-air update – automatic! You can also go ahead and download the GeForce Experience for your machine to get the update with a click of a button – make it happen! These drivers can also be downloaded at the GeForce Homepage where all great driver downloads are housed.

BioShock Infinite drivers blast forth for NVIDIA GeForce GPU is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This past week we’ve had the opportunity to have a peek at one of the many new features involved in the NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor technology family: Chimera computational photography. The NVIDIA Tegra 4 (and Tegra 4i) SoC works with what they’re calling the “world’s first mobile computational photography architecture”, and today what you’ll be seeing is one of the several features NVIDIA will be delivering to smartphones that utilize their processor. This first demonstration involves “Always-on HDR” photography.

What you’re seeing here is a demonstration done by NVIDIA at the official GTC 2013 conference. That the GPU Technology Conference, a multi-day event we attended with bells on – have a peek at our GTC 2013 tag portal now for everything we got to see – with more coming up in the future! The demonstration shown here is of a technology originally revealed earlier this year at NVIDIA’s keynote presentation at CES 2013 – head back to the original reveal post to see a whole different angle!

Here a high dynamic range scene has been arranged behind a device running the Chimera photography experience with an NVIDIA Tegra 4 (or perhaps 4i) processor inside. While a traditional HDR-capable camera takes two images one-after-another at different exposures and fuses them together, NVIDIA’s Always-on HDR feature works to take away the two negative bits involved with traditional HDR by allowing the following:

• Live preview through your camera’s display (on your smartphone, tablet, etc).
• The ability to capture moving objects.

With traditional HDR, if you’ve got someone running through the scene, you’ll get even more of a blur than you’d normally get because you’re effectively taking two photos. With NVIDIA’s method you’re capturing your image 10 times faster than you’d be capturing it without a Tegra 4 working to help. Because of this, when you’ve got a Tegra 4 processor in your smartphone, you’ll be able to use a flash in your HDR photos, use burst mode to capture several HDR shots in quick succession, and you’ll be able to capture HDR video, too!

We’re very much looking forward to rolling out with the Tegra 4 on smart devices soon – until then, we can only dream of the colors! Check out the full NVIDIA mobile experience in our fabulous Tegra hub right this minute!

NVIDIA Tegra 4 Chimera camera technology hands-on is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week at NVIDIA’s own GPU Technology Conference 2013, we’ve been introduced to no less than the company’s first end-to-end system: NVIDIA GRID VCA. The VCA part of the name stands for “Visual Computing Appliance”, and it’s part of the greater NVIDIA GRID family we were re-introduced to at CES 2013 earlier this year. This VCA is NVIDIA’s way of addressing those users – and SMBs (small-to-medium businesses) – out there that want a single web-accessible database without a massive rack of servers.

What is the NVIDIA GRID VCA?

The NVIDIA GRID VCA is a Visual Computing Appliance. In it’s current state, you’ll be working with a massive amount of graphics computing power no matter where you are, accessing this remote system over the web. As NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang noted on-stage at GTC 2013, “It’s as if you have your own personal PC under your desk” – but you’re in a completely different room.

You’re wireless, you’re in a completely different state – NVIDIA GRID VCA is basically whatever you need it to be. The first iteration of the NVIDIA GRID VCA will be packed as follows:

• 4U high.
• Sized to fit inside your standard server rack (if you wish).
• 2x highest-performance Xeon processors.
• 8x GRID GPU.
• 2x Kepler GPU.
• Support for 16 virtual machines.

You’ll be able to work with the NVIDIA GRID VCA system with basically any kind of computer, be it a Mac, a PC, mobile devices with Android, ARM or x86-toting machines, anything. With the NVIDIA GRID VCA, your remotely-hosted workspace shows up wherever you need it to. Each device you’ve got simply needs to download and run a single client going by the name “GRID client.” Imagine that.

If you’ve got a company using NVIDIA’s GRID, you’ll have access to mega-powerful computing on whatever machine you’ve got connected to it. One of the use-cases spoken about at GTC 2013 was some advanced video editing on-the-go.

Use Case 1: Autocad 3D and remote Video Editing

On-stage with NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang spoke James Fox, CEO of the group Dawnrunner. As a film and video production company (based in San Francisco, if you’d like to know), workers at Dawnrunner use Adobe software and Autodesk. As Fox notes, “Earth Shattering is what gets talked about in the office.”

Fox and his compatriots use their own GRID configuration to process video, head out to a remote spot and show a customer, and change the video on the spot if the customer does so wish it. While processing video of the monster sizes Dawnrunner works with, still needs relatively large computing power – “Hollywood big” we could call it – NVIDIA’s GRID can make it happen inside the NVIDIA GRID VCA.

With the processing going on inside the VCA and shown on a remote workstation environment (basically a real-time window into the GRID), you could potentially show real-time Hollywood movie-sized video editing from your Android phone. In that one image of a situation you’ve got the power of this new ecosystem.

Use Case 2: Hollywood Rendering with Octane Render

Of course no big claim with the word “Hollywood” in it is complete without some big-name movie examples to go with it. At GTC 2013, NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang brought both Josh Trank and Jules Urbach onstage. The former is the director of the upcoming re-boot (2015) movie The Fantastic Four (yes, that Fantastic Four), and the latter is the founder and CEO of the company known as Otoy.

Both men speak of the power of GPUs, Trank speaking first about how people like he, the movie director, use CGI from the beginning of the creation of a film with pre-visualization to bid it out to studios, getting funding before there is any cash to be had. Meanwhile Urbach spoke of how CGI like this can be rendered 40-100 times faster with GPUs than CPUs – and with that speed you’ve got a lot less energy spent and far fewer hours used for a final product.

With that, Urbach showed Otoy’s Octane Render (not brand new as of today, but made ultra-powerful with NVIDIA GRID backing it up). This system exists on your computer as a tiny app and connects your computer to a remote workstation – that’s where NVIDIA’s GRID comes in – and you’ll be able to work with massive amounts of power wherever you go.

Octane Render allows you to use “hundreds or thousands” of GPUs to be used by renderers in the cloud. Shown on-stage was a pre-visualization of a scene from the original Transformers movies (which Otoy helped create), streamed in real time over the web from Los Angeles to the location of the conference: San Jose.

What they showed, it was made clear, is that the power of GPUs in this context cannot be denied. With the power of 112 GPUs at once, it was shown that a high-powered Hollywood-big scene could be rendered in a second where in the past it would have taken several hours. And here, once again, it can all be controlled remotely.

Cost

There are two main configurations at the moment for NVIDIA’s GRID VCA, the first working with 8 GPU units, 32GB of GPU Memory, 192 GB System Memory, 16 thread CPU, and up to 8 concurrent users. The second is as follows – and this is the beast:

GPU: 16 GPUs
GPU Memory: 64 GB
System Memory: 384 GB
CPU: 32 thread CPU
Number of users: up to 16 concurrent

If you’re aiming for the big beast of a model, you’re going to be paying $39,900 USD with a $4,800-a-year software license. If you’re all about the smaller of the two, you’ll be paying $24,900 USD with a $2400-a-year software license.

Sound like the pocket-change salvation you’ve been waiting for? Let us know if your SMB will be busting out with the NVIDIA GRID VCA immediately if not soon, and be sure to let us know how it goes, too!

SlashGear 101: Remote Computing with NVIDIA GRID VCA is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Earlier today, we saw NVIDIA present Volta, it’s next-generation GPU architecture that is designed to increase performance by addressing one of the “eternal” problems linked to GPUs more than any other processor type: memory bandwidth. Volta is going to use RAM that is layered on top of the GPU silicon to reduce energy consumption and latency during memory accesses. With this, NVIDIA says that it will be able to push 1 Terabytes of data per second through the chip. This is 5X superior to the GeForce Titan, which tops 192GB/s. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Valve Claims “No Involvement” With Xi3’s Piston, EA Apologizes For SimCity Snafu,

Thought the new Tegra 4i was the bees knees when it we saw it last month? Well, NVIDIA gave us a bit more info on the next steps in the Tegra roadmap, Logan and Stark Parker. It turns out that these next two mobile platforms will both utilize NVIDIA’s CUDA technology, with Logan packing a Kepler GPU and Parker running a Project Denver 64-bit ARM CPU and a next-gen Maxwell GPU. Logan arrives early next year, while Parker won’t be in devices until sometime in 2015.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile

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