Taken from the Nvidia Website.
Imagine instead of taking over five hours to convert a video for your iPod, it only takes 35 minutesi.
Imagine using your PC to simulate protein folding to help find a cure
for debilitating diseases. Imagine that your PC can dramatically
accelerate everyday tasks, and deliver an exciting visual experience in
the process. Today that imagination becomes a reality now that the
leader in visual computing technologies, NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA), has
introduced its new family of GeForce® GTX 200 graphics processors
(GPUs)-which includes the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260
GPUs-taking graphics beyond gaming and gaming beyond anything that's
ever been possible before on a consumer computing platform.
"The advances NVIDIA continues to make in visual computing are simply
incredible, and we are excited to be one of the first companies in the
world to offer the technology in the new Exhilaration Edition of the
award-winning HP Blackbird 002," said Rahul Sood, chief technology
officer, HP Voodoo Business Unit. "Exceptional graphics quality and
performance is important to our customers, and now the GeForce GTX 200
GPUs are bringing something else into the mix. By using the GPU to
enhance everyday applications such as video encoding and manipulating
photos, HP Blackbird 002 is one of the most cutting-edge PC platforms
ever designed."
Graphics Beyond Gaming
One of the most powerful processors in
the PC is the GPU. Rendering 3D images in real-time is just about the
most mathematically intensive task your PC will ever undertake, but
it's not the only one. As PC applications become increasingly visual,
many ordinary tasks will benefit from the graphics horsepower provided
by the GPU, including encoding and playing high-definition videos,
editing photos, getting driving directions off the Internet, or simply
running a new operating system like Windows Vista.
"Millions of users around the world know how time consuming it is to
convert their home videos for use on video sharing sites such as
YouTube or for downloading to popular media players such as the iPod,"
said Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies. "Elemental has
developed the BadaBOOM™ Media Converter, a consumer video application
scheduled for release in August. By taking advantage of the massively
parallel, general-purpose computing architecture of a GeForce GPU, we
are able to transcode high-quality video 18 times faster than with
CPU-only implementations. This unprecedented performance scaling is the
reason why we have made sure that our RapiHDTM Video Platform takes
advantage of NVIDIA GPUs."
By recognizing that the value of a GPU transcends gaming, an increasing
number of applications are also being written that use the GPU for
straight, non-graphical computational tasks. For example, Stanford
University's distributed computing computational program Folding@Home,
combines the computing horsepower of millions of consumer GPUs to
simulate protein folding to help find cures for diseases such as
Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. With the computing processing power of the
GeForce GTX family, applications such as Folding@Home and others can
run upwards of 140 times faster on an NVIDIA general-purpose parallel
processor than on some of today's traditional CPUs.
Gaming That's Beyond
The CUDA general-purpose parallel processing mode will usher in a new
generation of ultra realistic games. Developers can use the
supercomputing power of the "CUDA Computing" mode to simulate
realistic, physically accurate effects then render beautiful images
using the "GeForce GPU" mode. NVIDIA GPUs are also the only ones to
support PhysX™ technology, the world's most pervasive physics engine
that is already delivering dynamic 3D realism to more than 140 games
across multiple platforms, and is being used by more than 25,000
developers worldwide. With PhysX, developers can incorporate effects
such as rigid body dynamics, collision detection, and cloth simulation
that dramatically change the way the games are played and how the
on-screen stories unfold, and then accelerate those effects using the
processing power of the GPU.
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