Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Users with notebooks equipped with NVIDIA® graphics processing units (GPUs) now have the added flexibility of downloading upgradeable graphics drivers directly from NVIDIA.com so they can immediately take advantage of new features, improved application compatibility, and performance optimizations. The first graphics driver release from NVIDIA will extend the NVIDIA CUDATM architecture to notebook GPUs, enabling the growing number of consumers moving to a notebook-only lifestyle to immediately experience the wide range of CUDA-based applications-from heart-stopping GPU-accelerated game physics to GPU-accelerated video conversion."

Three words: about freaking time! It's always driven me nuts when I buy a notebook and the lazy OEM never bothers to give me updated video drivers - that's exactly what happened when I bought a 17" Fujitsu notebook a few years back. It was the closest thing to a gaming laptop they made, and they never updated the graphics drivers. But that's all over not!

Oh, wait, it's not quite freakin' time yet - I just tried to download updated drivers for my XPS M1330, and got the same 176.44 drivers that I currently have, along with a message saying that I have to get drivers from Dell. I poked around a bit more, and found some beta drivrers - it turns out that they won't have WHQL-certified drivers available until early next year. Gee, thanks Nvidia. This is why PR gets a bad name sometimes - they omit part of the truth, making the headline deceptive. I'm not keen on trying beta drivers on my laptop - I value stability too much for that - but if you're up for some beta driver action, you can download the 179.28 beta drivers now for your 8000M and 9000M series notebook GPUs.

"The operation of a GPU is sublimely simple. The job consists of taking a group of polygons, on the one hand, and generating a group of pixels on the other. The polygons and pixels are independent of each other, and so can be processed by parallel units. That means that a GPU can afford to devote a large part of its die to calculating units which, unlike those of a CPU, will actually be used. GPUs differ from CPUs in another way. Memory access in a GPU is extremely coherent – when a texel is read, a few cycles later the neighboring texel will be read, and when a pixel is written, a few cycles later a neighboring pixel will be written. By organizing memory intelligently, performance comes close to the theoretical bandwidth. That means that a GPU, unlike a CPU, doesn’t need an enormous cache, since its role is principally to accelerate texturing operations. A few kilobytes are all that’s needed to contain the few texels used in bilinear and trilinear filters."

The article is not only a great history lesson in the GPU but also raises some good though provoking questions, like what kind of processing should be done on the CPU vs the GPU, how much should the CPU be coordinating video processing, etc. Overall, the direction in which we are moving is somewhat expected really -- i.e. specialized hardware created for various types of processing. Furthermore, the introduction of CUDA, with the GeForce 8800 series, application developers have a whole new level of control of the GPU cores. Have any of you used the beta APIs?