Whenever there’s a new video card or processor, Maingear is almost always on the scene with an upgrade — sometimes within seconds of its hardware partners. A plan to use NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 650 and 660 graphics chips from day one proves that rule in style, although Maingear is going the distance with some incentives beyond just shiny parts. Along with making the mid-tier GeForce technology an option for every desktop, the PC builder is offering special GTX 650 and 660 versions of its F131 and Potenza gaming rigs that knock as much as $150 off the price. The base prices of $949 for the limited-run Potenza and $1,199 for the F131 keep either system in serious gamer territory and preclude us from calling them tremendous bargains. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to grouse very loudly: it’s not often that a price drop and a hardware upgrade walk hand in hand.
nVidia today introduced the new Quadro K5000 4GB GPU for Mac Pro users. Built around nVidia’s latest “Kepler” architecture, this high-end graphics card supports up to 4K resolutions, the latest OpenGL and OpenCL standards. The Quadro K5000 offers 1536 processing cores shuffling pixels at up to 173GB/s along a 256-bit path to 4GB of GDDR5 memory. The card also supports Shader Model 5.0, Open GL 3.2 on Mac OS X, and Open GL 4.3 and DirectX 11 when running Windows under BootCamp. nVidia will release the Quadro K5000 later this year for $2,249. [nVidia]
So, you probably didn’t even get the cellophane off your Xperia Tablet S yet (for those in the UK at least), but Sony has already beaten the likes of iFixit to the strip-down post. It’s one of the firm’s own engineers, Takuya Inaba, who takes a knife to the minty-fresh tablet — revealing its NVIDIA innards for all to see. Of course, we could tell you all about how he opened up the tablet, removing 10 screws, and breaking the splash-proof internal seal, but we gather you’d probably rather see the deed for yourselves. Full gory video after the break, but just remember, don’t try this at home or you might as well tear up that warranty, too.
The developers at Vector Unit have released a new game by the name of Beach Buggy Blitz, and to celebrate said release in the TegraZone, NVIDIA and SlashGear are teaming up to bring you a set of THREE Tegra 3 quad-core processor-toting tablets. You’ll have the opportunity to get your hands on a Transformer Prime TF201 tablet/keyboard dock combo or one of two Google Nexus 7 tablets! With these lovely beasts you’ll be able to rock out on Beach Buggy Blitz all night long!
We had a bit of a hands-on look at the game just yesterday that you can witness by heading to the post entitled Vector Unit brings Beach Buggy Blitz to TegraZone and hands-on. Once you’ve experienced the excellence, head to the TegraZone and download the game absolutely free! Or if you’re currently without a device that works with an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor, you’ve got another option.
We had a lot of fun with the last tablet giveaway working with our NVIDIA Tegra Hub – so much fun that we’ve decided to do it again, right here and now! You’ve got the chance to win one of three Tegra-toting tablets (listed above and below) – all you’ve got to do is follow these simple steps!
2. Select your favorite Tegra-toting device or NVIDIA TegraZone game from our ever-expanding [Tegra Hub] and comment on the Facebook post with a link (from the hub) along with some select words on why you love it so much – or why you want it so much, if you wish!
3. Sit back and wait for the end of the contest, and hope you get picked!
This giveaway starts on Friday, September 7th, 2012 and runs until Friday, Sept. 14th at midnight. We’ll pick a collection of our favorite entries and from that set we’ll choose three winners at random – we’ll announce the winners on Monday, September 17th on Facebook and right here in this original giveaway post!
Competition is open to residents of the US only, over the age of 18. One entry per person. Family members of NVIDIA, ASUS, Google, Vector Unit, and SlashGear/Android Community are not permitted to enter. Competition entries are only accepted via the specified Android Community forum post; entries left in the comments section of this or any other post will not be recognized.
The winners will be contacted by an Android Community/SlashGear staff member ON FACEBOOK upon being selected and will be expected to respond to that staff member; they will be expected to respond within 24 hours else their prize may be forfeit and another winner selected.
Editors decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. Winners agree that their name and details of their entry may be used for promotional purposes by, but not limited to Android Community, SlashGear, NVIDIA, and Vector Unit.
Prizes consist of two 16GB Google Nexus 7 tablets and a Transformer TF201 Prime tablet and keyboard combo. There are no other alternative for prize winners unless this prizes become unavailable, in which case Android Community reserves the right to substitute another prize of equal or greater value. Giveaway provided by SlashGear/Android Community. Prizes provided by NVIDIA and Vector Unit. Any questions regarding this giveaway should be directed to giveaway [AT] slashgear.com.
NVIDIA just announced that its new Quadro K5000 GPU will be available on Mac Pros, offering 4K display compatibility and support for up to four displays, not to mention 4GB of graphics memory and about 2x faster performance than the Fermi-based Quadro 4000. While the Kepler-powered chip won’t actually hit Apple systems till later this year, we got a first look at the K500 on a Mac here at IBC. NVIDIA demoed Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro CS6 on a Mac Pro with dual K5000 GPUs.
As you’ll see in the video below, with 11 streams of 1080p video at 30 fps in Premiere Pro (and one overlay of the NVIDIA logo), GPU acceleration handles the workload seamlessly, letting us add effects in real time without any processing delay. Switching to software rendering mode in the editing program shows a night-and-day difference: video playback is extremely choppy, and processing moves at a crawl. Even with two K5000 chips in this desktop, Premiere Pro utilizes just one, but After Effects takes advantage of both GPUs. In this program, NVIDIA showed us ray-tracing, a computationally intensive 3D imaging feature, which only became available in After Effects with the release of CS6. Like in Premiere Pro, the program runs smoothly enough to let us edit images in real time. Take a look for yourself by heading past the break.
For the most part, PC enthusiasts still imagine Mac computers as closed platforms with hardware that you can’t upgrade. Outside of upgrading RAM, that notion might be true for some Mac computers. However, Mac Pro users do have a few more options for upgrades. NVIDIA has announced a new video card for Mac Pro users that promises very impressive performance called the Quadro K5000.
The new video card is based on the Kepler architecture, which NVIDIA claims is the world’s fastest and most efficient GPU design. NVIDIA says that the K5000 is the most powerful professional-class GPU ever created for Macintosh users and the video card is aimed at designers and digital content creators. The GPU supports Cinema 4K resolution of 4096 x 2160.
The video card has a new display engine that is capable of driving up to four displays at the same time. The Quadro K5000 is equipped with 4 GB of graphic memory promising faster interactivity when using design and content creation applications. NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture promises to allow content creators to run key creation applications up to twice as fast and with lower power requirements than Fermi-based Quadro 4000 video cards for the Mac.
If a single Quadro K5000 isn’t enough power, the design of the video card supports two of the K5000 GPU’s in a single Mac Pro, sort of like SLI support for gamers. The GPU supports OpenGL, OpenCL, and CUDA. How much does all this power cost? The estimated retail price for the video card starts at $2249. Performance certainly has a price.
NVIDIA’s Kepler-powered Quadro K5000 GPU will be making its way to Apple’s Mac Pro systems, the company announced today at IBC. The professional graphics card made its debut earlier this summer and is slated to ship beginning in October for $2,249. Timing for the Quadro K5000 for Mac isn’t quite so firm, with NVIDIA simply stating that it’ll ship “later this year,” though pricing is expected to be in line with the previously announced flavor. The next-gen GPU is said to offer up to 2x faster performance over the Quadro 4000, while also delivering 4K display support, quad display capability through two DVI-DL and two DisplayPort 1.2 connectors, and 4 gigs of graphics memory. Furthermore, each Mac Pro will be able to support up to two separate cards, should you need the extra power. You’ll find full details in the press release after the break.
Get down and dirty with the newest game from Vector Unit, the developers who brought you hits like Riptide GP and Shine Runner – starting with all devices running NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 quad-core processor and Android. This beast of a game, Beach Buggy Blitz, bring you in deep with another awesome racing game with heavy physics coming at you from all angles. You’ll see lens splashes, dynamic highlights around all the edges, and motion blur galore.
This game has you blasting forth in a buggy that’s customized by you in a race not against physical enemies – not in a traditional sense – but time itself. Collect coins to gain more time in your clock and make sure you’re not out in the middle of nowhere when the buzzer rings. Once you’ve collected enough coins, you can spend them on upgrades from the shop – and you can trick your car out to the max, as well. The entire game consists of you moving forward into excellence while you destroy all manner of explodable objects.
Of course there’s a bit of real-time shadow rendering as well – and it’s all so simple: you’ll be running this fantasy of effects on your quad-core processor-toting Tegra 3 device straight from the TegraZone today! This game has both been announced and released by Vector Unit in collaboration with NVIDIA, and we want YOU to get into it. In addition to the hands-on experience you’re about to have in this video, you’ll be invited to a giveaway of ours later this week.
UPDATE: It appears that there’s been a delay in releasing this game to the Google Play app store and TegraZone for now, but stay tuned as it’s delivered soon!
That’s right, you’re going to want to write this one down: later today on both SlashGear and Android Community we’re having a Beach Buggy Blitz event that’ll be lasting several days – and you’re going to want to get involved! For the time being though, have a peek at the hands-on video above and check the game out on the TegraZone right now, or head straight to the Google Play app store immediately if not soon to pick Beach Buggy Blitz up for yourself. It’s not to be missed.
Adobe’s video editing application is already a lovely thing on the Retina MacBook Pro, but not visually — only in terms of its raw performance on that Core i7 CPU. Until today’s update — 6.0.2 — the software hasn’t actually been able to make use of HiDPI itself, and neither has it been able to exploit the performance-boosting potential of GPU compute on the laptop’s NVIDIA GTX 650M graphics card. If you’re lucky enough to own this combo of hardware and software, Adobe’s official blog suggests that you go ahead and check for the update or apply it manually following the instructions at the source link below (it’s actually within Bridge that you should check for the update, with other Adobe titles closed). We’re hopefully about to apply it ourselves and will report back on its impact.
Update on the update: As expected, video thumbnails look sumptuous in the absence of pixelation, making this a worthy revision. That said, software encoding of a short timeline was still faster with the Mercury Engine set to software mode rather than GPU compute. A 2:30 clip took 2:02 to encode with OpenCL, 2:00 to encode with CUDA, but just 1:42 to encode in Software mode. No doubt people who do multi-cam editing or need to render complex effects in real-time may see a benefit — please, let us know if you do!
Update: Just had word from NVIDIA that may explain what’s happening with our encoding times. We’re told it’s only if we enable “Maximum Render Quality” that GPU compute will shine through in terms of performance, because enabling max quality in software mode would slow it down. So far we’ve only tried with default settings, so clearly there’s room here for more experimentation.
Linux godfather Linus Torvalds may have a frosty relationship with NVIDIA, but that hasn’t stopped the company from improving its hardware’s support for the open-source operating system. In fact, the chipset-maker is working on the OS’ compatibility with its Optimus graphics switching tech, which would enable laptops to conserve power by swapping between discrete and integrated graphics on the fly. In an email sent to a developer listserv, NVIDIA software engineer Aaron Plattner revealed that he’s created a working proof of concept with a driver. There’s no word on when the Tux-loving masses may see Optimus support, but we imagine that day can’t come soon enough for those who want better battery life while gaming on their mobile machines.
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