Nvidia shows its A.I. system driving a car

Nvidia may not build card but it sure wants all future driver-less cars to have their hardware powering its systems, and nothing better than to put it into action and show what it can do.

Project Wetbrush acurately simulates painting

There's no shortage of painting apps that can simulate different artistic styles. But Adobe and Nvidia partnered up to create a physically accurate painting simulation running in real time.

Nvidia Tegra X1 is as powerful as the most poweruful supercomputer of 2000

We all know technology has evolved by leaps and bounds in the past decades, but it never ceases to amaze me to actually see what we've accomplished. Something like shrinking down the most powerful supercomputer of 15 years ago, to the point where it can fit in a mobile device, like Nvidia did Tegra with its new Tegra X.

Tegra K1 puts a Xbox 360 and a PS3 in your pocket

Just the other day some friends and I were talking about how much longer we would have to wait to have Xbox 360/PS3 quality games and graphics on a mobile device. And little did we know that Nvidia was about to answer that question far sooner than we anticipated. The new Tegra K1 has 192 CUDA cores and takes the same Kepler architecture we find in their desktop GPUs to the mobile world.

The performance improvements are quite significant:

The K1 is not only more powerful than a Xbox 360 and a PS3... it's almost as powerful as both of them combined! (And it offers additional benefits, such as DX11 and OpenGL 4.4 support.)

Even more impressive, it can do this while using just 5W - compared to the 100W used by each of these game consoles. Nvidia has also scored a nice partner, showing Unreal Engine 4 running on the K1 as well as some games, like Trine and Serious Sam 3.

Though there's still room for improvement (as always), it's incredible that we will have access to this kind of graphic power in mobile devices this year. And best of all, in the second half of the year a new K1 version will pop up, with a dual core 64 bits "Denver" CPU (the current version uses a 32bit quad-core "plus 1" CPU).

... So... how long will we have to wait till the same thing happens to the newer PS4 and Xbox One? Four years? Less? What's your take on that?

Tegra 6 to be 100x Faster than Tegra 2

The CPUs and GPUs used in mobile devices have been evolving at an incredible rate. Suffice to say, the new Galaxy S4 is twice as fast as the previous S3, and to really put things into perspective Nvidia has reveled its roadmap, and announcing a 100x performance improvement when it "Parker" (Tegra 6) comes out in 2015.

Yes, Nvidia keeps using super-hero code names for their Tegra models: Tegra 3 was known as "Kal-El" (Superman), Tegra 4 as "Wayne" (Batman), and the upcoming Tegras are "Logan" (Wolverine) arriving later this year and "Parker" (Spider man) in 2015. This means in 2015 we'll have mobile devices with 100x more power than the ones we had in 2011 - it's simply... incredible!

But even before that, the upcoming "Logan" should already be quite impressive, as it will add a Kepler GPU to the mix (Kepler is the existing GPU technology you can find on "big computer" graphics' cards with Nvidia GPUs).

And talking about GPUs, those will also keep up doubling performance every two years. Next year the Maxwell architecture will replace the current Kepler, with an unified virtual memory that will simplify developers' lives by allowing both the CPU and GPU to access any memory content without having to worry if it's on the CPU side or the GPU side. And later on... the Volta GPUs, that will feature a stacked memory design that will finally take care of the "starving" memory bandwidth of current GPU architectures. Nvidia says it will have enough bandwidth to go through an entire bluray movie in a fraction of a second.

Can't wait to see all that power put into good use!

[via cnet]

Nvidia Shield - Portable Gaming Console

Nvidia has decided to take the mobile gaming fight even more seriously, and has just unveiled their Shield at CES 2013.

Using the brand new Tegra 4 (the latest and greatest in ARM chips from Nvidia, with a 4+1 Cortex A15 cores, and a new GeForce with 72 GPU cores), this Android mobile gaming machine will surely leave every other mobile gaming device in the dust.

Nvidia didn't take any chances with Shield. If you ask any game how a mobile console should be, they would surely tell you: give us a Xbox controller with a screen on top. And that's precisely what Nvidia did (Although I don't quite understand why they decided to put the digital cursor keys in the top left spot instead of the analog thumbstick.

As for the screen: we're talking about a 5" 1280x720 HD screen, that should be more than enough to keep you going. (And considering 5" FullHD screens are now popping up, one can expect the second generation of this console to offer one as well... when the time comes.)

Besides games, you can also run any Android App you want - as this Shield runs Android in all its glory.

But, it's games that this beast was designed to excel at: and it does that even better than you might think. Not only it can run Android games... but it can even run PC games, provided you have a PC with a GTX card. Just like OnLive games are processed "in the cloud" and streamed to your device; now you can do the same, locally. You can have your PC running the game, and streaming it in real time to your Nvidia Shield! Meaning... you can play your PC games anywhere around your house.

And if you don't have a powerful PC, you can still use Nvidia's GRID cloud gaming platform.

So... you won't have any trouble playing a PC game on your living room, streaming the game from your PC to your Shield, and from the Shield to your large screen TV... in resolutions up to 4k!




This Shield might also become a serious contender for the "secondary screen" controlers like the one Nintendo is pushing for with their new Wii U. With a big player now in the game, do you think it will take long for PC game developers to start taking advantage of the Shield? It can do everything the Wii U can - and more!

And it should even beat it in one other important aspect: battery life. The Shield comes with a 28Wh battery - that's a battery larger than the one you find in the Nexus 10 tablet - and should allow for "enough" time playing around without worrying it will run out in the worst possible moment.


The Shield should arrive in Q2 (in US/Canada), and the price is promised to be "competitive"... Dare I say, something int the $299 price range - or is that too much wishful thinking?

[tabela via Anandtech]

Mobile Graphics to Surpass Xbox 360 Quality by 2014

Anyone can attest just how fast the mobile devices evolution has been in the past couple of years. From modest single-core CPUs to powerful quad-core CPUs, and from low-resolution screens to tablets that have higher resolution than most desktop high-definition monitors.

Nvidia decided to put that into perspective, by showings us a graph of graphic evolution in PC, consoles and mobiles... and where we can see that by 2014, mobile GPUs should surpass the graphic power of the current generation of consoles.

Sure, by then we'll most likely be already playing on the next generation of game consoles by Microsoft and Sony, with even more powerful graphic capabilities... But give the evolution rate, within a few more years, they're likely to catch up again.

[via anandtech]

Nvidia Kal-El shows Tegra's Future

We all "mobile" is all the rage right now, and Nvidia just poured high-octane fuel into the fire! Nvidia's next-gen super-chip (aptly named Kal-El) shows us what the Tegra line has to offer. Nvidia's project Kal El puts mobile chips up there, right next (and above) common desktop CPUs.

We're talking a quad-core chip next to a brand new 12 core Nvidia GPU, allowing screens up to  2560x1600(!) and five times more powerful than current Tegra 2 implementations.

Arriving this Summer, this Kal-el can even surpass a Core 2 (T7200) Intel CPU, as you can see in the following benchmark.


Care to see how this translates into... browsing?



But, want to know what's even better? There are new super-heros coming from Nvidia with each new year (Wayne, Logan, Stark) each one doubling its predecessor performance. Meaning... by 2014, we'll be using devices almost 100x more powerful than our current Tegra 2 devices.

Can you sincerely imagine what that will allow us to do/imagine?

P.S. Engadget has some videos showing Kal-El running Great Battles Medieval at 720p with 650 solders on screen, compared to a regular Tegra 2:

Nvidia Tegra 2 Android Tablet

Nvidia keeps teasing us with tablet prototypes. This time they've shown a Tegra 2 Android Tablet with a dua core Cortex A9 CPU (newer generation than the one Apple's A4 was based on) and 1GB Ram (iPad has only 256MB.) You also get a front facing camera and USB ports.

Nothing was said about battery life, price... and most important of all... when it will be availble.

Nvidia Optimus Power Demo

If you recall Nvidia Optimus you'll know this is a system that allows your computer to dynamically switch between graphic cards depending on process at hand.

This time, I bring you quite a clarifying video that shows that the external - more powerful - graphic chip is completely powered off when not needed (not just in a suspended standby state.)

How can we be sure? Well... how about actually removing and re-attaching the graphic card while the rest of the system is still powered on, is that enough for you? :)

Nvidia Optimus GPU Dynamic Switching

Nvidia is once again pushing mixed GPU interaction to the limits.

For a long time computer manufacturers have been trying to find the right balance between performance and power efficiency, especially where it matters the most: battery powered laptops.

While stuffing two graphic cards in laptops is nothing new: a power hungry one offering maximum performance, and a less powerful one offering maxium power savings; it was up to the user to select which one to use according to special power schemes or by toggling a button.
Often, this also meant the user had to log off and on again... which wasn't very user friendly.


With this Nvidia Optimus the principle is the same, but the toggling is made based on the current needs, without any user interaction and without even flickering the screen.

Asus is scheduled to have this system in their laptops (UL50Vf, N61Jv, N71Jv, N82Jv, e U30Jc) soon.

Check the following video (the jerkiness of the video is due to the capture software, in real life it looks as smooth as you'd expect it to be.)

NVIDIA Optimus Technology - GPU Switching 2 - PC Perspective from Ryan Shrout on Vimeo.

Folding@Home with 27 Nvidia GTX 295

If you think a single Nvidia GTX 295 is nice, what can you say about this rig with 23 GTX 295s?



Of course, this system was not intended for playing games but for a much more noble use: to use the immense processing power these cards haver to help research Huntington's Diseases using Folding@Home.

Even if you have a much less powerful computer, you might consider joining the effort, as every CPU cycle helps.

Nvidia Tegra

It looks like Nvidia Tegra is getting ready to take the market by storm, and with Android to boot, it opens up an interesting range of mobile devices.

Remember that this new chipset can easily play 1080p HD video, and keep doing it for 10h in a single charge! That's nothing but amazing and unheard of to this day.



You can see some more videos of Nvidia's Tegra here.

Nvidia intros GTX 280

This is exactly what I needed (better yet, three of those) to be able to play on my 24" LCD.

Nvidia has once again turned all graphic cards obsolete, by presenting their new high-end GTX 280 and 260 models.

GTX 280 has 240 processing cores and 1GB RAM, while the smaller GTX 260 has "only" 192 cores and 896MB RAM.

And to show that all this power is more than enough to handle tasks beyond 3D games:



Not even PS3's Cell processor can get close.

As for the games, check these benchmarks. This a card that allows you to play most games at 50-60fps in ultra-high 2560x1600 resolution.

Even Crysis moves along nicely at a more manageable1920x1200.

The drawback is its price, $640 and $400 USD are not exactly cheap. Particularly considering you can get similar performance in most cases with a 9800 GX2 which costs a lot less. So... who will actually spend a small fortune on that? Not that many people... (Then again, how many of you have a 30" LCD to justfify these beasts - or even a 24" LCD?)

It will also be curious to see who will end up winning the "arms race" in 3D gaming: if Nvidia with its monolithic super powered single chips, or AMD/ATI with its smaller but scalable chip architecture.

With Intel alreday demoing real-time ray tracing in 3D games using 16 cores CPUs... it won't take long till we have enough CPU power to have photorealistic graphics in our computers. And then... will there really be a need for discrete graphic cards? (Just like what happened with math coprocessors chips back in the day.)

via [Engadget, Gizmodo, Techreport]