NVIDIA

NVIDIA Drivers Receive Windows 8 Certification

2012-06-01T02:29:20Z

In conjunction with today’s launch of Microsoft Windows 8 Release Preview and the opening of the Microsoft Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) for Windows 8, NVIDIA has received Windows 8 certification for its new R302 graphics drivers.

The WHQL certification of R302 drivers highlights the fact that NVIDIA is in lock-step with Microsoft and is fully prepared for Windows 8.

The new Windows 8 WHQL-certified GeForce R302 drivers will be available for download early next week from GeForce.com (Note: R302 drivers will be Windows 8 only. Other Windows operating systems will continue to use R300 drivers).

NVIDIA’s Windows 8 drivers support all the features in the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) v1.2. The drivers also support award-winning NVIDIA 3D Vision and 3DTV Play products, allowing you to play more than 600 games, watch Blu-ray movies and view photos – all in 3D.

For more information on the Microsoft Windows 8 Release Preview, please visit: http://preview.windows.com

NVIDIA Snags Green Award From Silicon Valley Nonprofit

2012-05-31T16:09:09Z

Our ongoing commitment to global citizenship hasn’t gone unnoticed by the eco-minded folks at Acterra, who champion environmentalism in Silicon Valley.

The nonprofit just awarded us its 2012 Business Environmental Award for large-company environmental sustainability. This comes just a few months after Newsweek ranked us #10 on its list of America’s Greenest Companies, up from 188^th place in 2010 and 314^th place in ~~2010~~ 2009.

The Business Environmental Award celebrates NVIDIA’s approach to managing our environmental impact across three areas:

NVIDIA employees make an effort
to minimize our environmental impact
on our campuses and out in the
community, where they often volunteer
to plant trees and organic produce

Through product design, we’re working to improve power efficiency. Improving performance per watt is a guiding principle of our design process and a key consideration at each step of product development. Read more about our efforts toward power efficiency.
Through an intensive focus on our campuses, we’ve pledged to reduce energy and water use and waste. By using more efficient data centers, lights that shut off when not used and providing fully compostable recycled paper plates and corn-based compostable utensils, cups, lids and straws, we have significantly reduced our environmental footprint.
Through partnerships, we work with our suppliers and customers to improve their awareness of environmental issues and understand their expectations of our environmental performance.

The Acterra judges were especially impressed by our efforts to integrate environmental considerations across all aspects of our business – from the way NVIDIA engages employees to build energy efficient products to NVIDIA’s goal to reduce our environmental footprint on our campus and out in the community.

The Acterra Business Environmental Awards, initiated in 1990, are one of the Bay Area’s oldest and most prestigious environmental recognition programs. NVIDIA will be honored at the 2012 Business Environmental Awards Reception on Thursday, May 31 in Palo Alto, Calif.

Acterra offers thousands of volunteer programs that help improve the environment – ranging from habitat restoration to carbon reduction.

To learn more about the work that NVIDIA is doing related to the environment, please visit our global citizenship report.

[Featured image credit: Maciej Frolow]

Choosing The Right GPU To Take Adobe Workflows To The Max

2012-05-31T16:08:42Z

As the Adobe Pro Video & Audio Field Team manager for the Americas, I lead a team responsible for working with customers and vendors on the newest technologies that benefit our Pro Video and Audio applications.

We share our findings with the senior engineering teams and product managers, giving them insight into the real workflow benefits of these new technologies. The result: fine-tuned versions of each application, ready to leverage the GPU and tackle the next workflow challenge.

One example of our close collaboration with NVIDIA is our new Mercury Transmit feature, which gives partners a simple programming interface through which they can hook up hardware to Adobe Premiere Pro, Prelude and Encore. NVIDIA and Adobe engineers created the Transmit plug-in to allow Quadro SDI boards to take advantage of Mercury Transmit throughout the entire CS6 Production Premium suite, including our new Color Grading application, Speed Grade.

There are five CS6 workflows that I see most users falling into. Here are my recommendations of NVIDIA GPU setups best-suited for each.

Full CS6 Production Premium Suite workflow

For heavy users of After Effects, Premiere Pro, SpeedGrade and Photoshop, you’ll want to select either the Quadro 5000 or 6000, depending on your After Effects needs. ~~The more memory you have on the card (6000 has the most @ 6GB), the longer the After Effects RAM previews.~~

For more GPU power, you can add an NVIDIA Tesla C2075 board. This is essentially an NVIDIA Maximus setup and is insanely fast. This provides a dual GPU config for After Effects users. NVIDIA Quadro SDI boards are also supported in CS6 Premiere Pro using NVIDIA’s new Mercury Transmit driver. **Note** check your power supply requirements when using two or more boards in your system.

CS6 Production Premium Suite Workflow
For those of you who use all the tools but spend most of your time in Premiere Pro (using the other apps to create assets for your Premiere sequences), you can use the Quadro 5000 or 4000 for starters and when you need more GPU power you can drop in a Tesla board at any time to get a nice “bump” in performance. Mac Pro users should choose the Quadro 4000.

Traditional CS6 Premiere Pro Workflow
If 95% of your work is done using Premiere Pro, you’ll want to go with either the Quadro 2000 or 4000. The 2000 is an excellent choice for those Windows users on a budget and mainly doing two or three layers of video and graphics. If you find yourself needing more GPU power, you can drop in a Tesla C2075. The Quadro 2000 + Tesla setup gives you amazingly fast performance. Mac Pro users should go with the Quadro 4000.

CS6 After Effects Workflow
If you’re using the new 3D ray tracing engine in After Effects and need all-out performance and time savings for extruding 3D images, then you’ll want a high-end NVIDIA Maximus configuration boasting a Quadro 6000 and a Tesla C2075. For users who only occasionally use this new 3D feature, an entry-level Maximus system comprised of a Quadro 2000 and Tesla C2075 is a good choice that still delivers great ray tracing performance gains compared to dual high-end CPUs.

Otherwise, the biggest concern for most After Effects power users is how much RAM is on the card – RAM determines the length of RAM previews For power users, cards like the Quadro 6000 offer the most CUDA cores and most memory as of the writing of this blog article. The Quadro 5000 offers less memory but still displays high CUDA GPU performance. By adding a Tesla C2075, After Effects can take advantage of both GPUs. The combination of a Quadro 6000 and a Tesla C2075 board gives you the best possible GPU performance currently available. Mac Pro users will want the Quadro 4000.

SpeedGrade Workflow
The Quadro 2000 is an excellent choice for SpeedGrade users, as it has enough memory and GPU power to deliver excellent real-time performance. You can also use any of the other Quadro cards: I use a Quadro 5000 along with a Quadro SDI Output card in my SpeedGrade system.

Consider opting for the SDI Output option. This allows for real-time, high-end SDI monitoring. It is currently the only SDI board supported in CS6 SpeedGrade for Windows. (NVIDIA Quadro SDI boards are also supported in CS6 Premiere Pro, Prelude and Encore via NVIDIA’s new Mercury Transmit driver).

A few thoughts on Mac and OSX
I also use a Mac at least 50 percent of my day and fully understand Mac Pro users’ concerns about having one Quadro card to pick from. The first thing to understand is that Apple needs to approve all hardware that goes into the Mac Pro. As any OSX user knows, Apple has a tightly controlled environment and has been able to give its users a solid experience when it comes to a video editing platform – which is one of the main benefits for many Mac users. Apple ensures their Mac’s maintain specific internal hardware requirements (power requirements, heat, and PCI bus voltage) to work with their unified OSX Graphics driver. NVIDIA has to work within these guidelines and come up with a solid solution for the Mac Pro user.

The Quadro 4000 and the older FX4800 are excellent choices that offer good memory and great CUDA performance. NVIDIA continues to update the CUDA driver for OSX (just updated to 4.2.7 this week). I’ll continue to watch out for the Mac Pro user in my discussions with NVIDIA and make recommendations on what they would like to see in future board releases.

NVIDIA GPU’s Render Stunning Visuals in Transformers Ride

2012-05-29T19:49:03Z

Universal Studios took the wraps off its latest attraction today, a $40 million technological tour de force stuffed with more high-tech gadgetry than an electronics superstore.

The new Transformers: The Ride at Universal Studios, Hollywood, is purpose-built to deliver a more immersive jolt than audiences have ever experienced.

Transformers:	The Ride
Cost to build	$40 million
Building size	60,000 sq. ft.
Height	60 ft tall
Ride track	2,000 ft long
Ride vehicle	Custom platform can roll, pitch and rotate 360 degrees
Audio	5,000 watts per vehicle
Screens	14 screens (oversized front projection, rear projection,flat and compound curved)
Projectors	34 total projecting imagery at 4K x 4K (4096×4096 pixels)

A fleet of custom-designed motion-platform vehicles takes 12 passengers at a time on a simulated ride through a Transformers battlescape, pausing before towering screens depicting attacking Transformers in photorealistic 3D. This is where several elements come together to make riders feel like they’ve entered a real robotic rumble:

The 3D imagery boasts 4K x 4K resolution, or four times greater than the typical movie
Some of the ride’s 14 screens are curved around the audience, deepening the illusion of being immersed in the action
Each vehicle is like a flight simulator, whose motion is synchronized to the on-screen action
Every vehicle is outfitted with a 5,000 watt, 14 channel audio system to heighten the experience

The ride’s impressive visuals were painstakingly rendered at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) over the course of two years. The challenge: render all-new content using huge datasets in 4K resolutions, in 3D, at the correct perspective for each screen (some of which are compound curved). It turned out to be harder than the folks at ILM expected, but the team leveraged NVIDIA GPUs to make the high-resolution magic happen.

Chick Russell, Universal Creative’s show producer, said, “We were using every single server and computer that ILM had. This was the most complex project ILM ever worked on.”

Check out this video for our exclusive behind-the-scenes visit.

Jeff White, the visual effects supervisor at ILM, said, “Almost all of our work is in 3D. The Transformers, the robots, the backgrounds — all of it is the heaviest, most complicated characters we can possibly work with. Optimus on the first film was over 10,000 pieces — every robot is easily over a million polygons.

These dual projectors make 3D magic

“The real key to the creative part of the process is the ability to iterate fast,” he said. “That’s why the NVIDIA GPUs are such a big part of our work. When you’re able to animate Optimus or Megatron and see them play back in real time, it is so key to judge their real performance. Because these characters are so difficult to work with, that’s where we rely on the speed of the Quadro GPUs, for that real-time feedback.”

Of course Universal Creative needed a sophisticated way to blast all those pretty pixels onto the screens. They do that through an array of 34 Christie projectors with custom 3D lenses.

Russell summed it up neatly: “This is without a doubt the most technically advanced ride that Universal Studios has ever done.”

The ride opens today at Universal Studios, Hollywood. Tell them NVIDIA sent you.

BONUS: Win an NVIDIA t-shirt! Simply leave a comment below, with your best guess of the Transformer part below, and the movie in which it appeared, to be entered to win.

Kizuna Update: In Japan, Building a New Kids’ Sports Field

2012-05-24T21:43:35Z

NVIDIA is helping school kids in tsunami-ravaged northeastern Japan get back on their feet, quite literally, with the opening of a multipurpose athletic field at a school in Kesennuma City. The effort is part of our Operation Kizuna efforts to spur recovery following last year’s disaster.

In the wake of the tragedy, Shishiori Junior High School’s original athletic field was converted into a temporary housing site, which likely will remain in place for up to five years. With local coordination provided by the nonprofit group Peace Winds Japan, donations from NVIDIA employees and others were used to construct a new field.

Mari Nagahara (a Tokyo-based member of our Operation Kizuna team) and I were fortunate enough to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week at the school’s new field. Its middle-schoolers will use it for physical education classes and as a practice area for its baseball, softball and soccer teams. A batting cage or backstop is still needed before the baseball and softball teams can play games, but it was a thrill to see kids using the field immediately after the opening ceremony.

This young baseball player has good form

We were joined at the ceremony by local city officials, including Kesennuma City’s mayor, and by reporters from local newspapers and regional affiliates of national broadcasters.

To a large extent, the field was made possible by the willingness of six local landowners to provide the school with a five-year lease at no cost – the school principal’s determination was a key factor in this deal. Discussions with the landowners started last winter and the construction of the field was completed in about two weeks at a cost of ¥10 million (approximately $125,000).

We are proud of NVIDIA and our fellow employees, who pledged nearly $2.75 million to Operation Kizuna. Of these funds, $250,000 was directed at helping young survivors of the tragedy. Through global aid agency Mercy Corps’ art therapy and sports programs, the focus has been on helping children deal with the mental and emotional effects of their experience.

In addition to supporting youth programs like Shishiori’s new athletic field, NVIDIA employee donations have been used to provide local entrepreneurs with seed capital to restart their businesses and develop new products and services. These range from a kimono cleaning and dyeing service, a daycare center, a “peace jam” made of vegetables purchased from local farmers and even a new tea from the leaves of mulberry trees farmed in the area to grow silkworms.

The NVIDIA donation directed toward this small business recovery program is the largest amount Mercy Corps has ever received from a single corporate donor.

The programs being funded by NVIDIA’s donations are not only helping revitalize the local economy by restoring businesses and creating new jobs, but also directly serves the children in these communities. Perhaps most importantly, however, they are restoring the hope that, over time, these communities and its families will once again prosper.

GPU Computing Experts Join CUDA Fellow Ranks

2012-05-22T18:09:26Z

Two more researchers have been added to the ranks of nine existing CUDA Fellows, who are recognized by NVIDIA for their contributions to the areas of CUDA architecture and parallel computing.

John Owens, an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, and Massimo Bernaschi, chief technology officer at the Institute of Applied Computing at Italy’s CNR (National Research Council) received the honor. This entitles them to the latest NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, a travel stipend, technical support from NVIDIA and priority access to NVIDIA GPU hardware and software.

The CUDA Fellow Program was established to recognize, reward and assist researchers who use the CUDA architecture within their disciplines or geographies. CUDA Fellows have demonstrated the benefits of GPU computing to advance their fields of research and have been instrumental in introducing GPU computing to their peers.

Here’s a bit of background information on the pair:

John Owens is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Davis, which he joined in 2003.

His group pursues research problems in GPU computing in both GPU fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, and multi-GPU computing) and applications. His graduate students have won five NVIDIA Graduate Research Fellowships. He graduated from Stanford with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2002 and from Berkeley with a B.S. in EECS in 1995.

Massimo Bernaschi is chief technology officer of the Institute for Applied Computing at Italy’s CNR (National Research Council). He is also an adjunct professor of Systems Programming at “Sapienza” University in Rome; trainer in Digital Forensics at “Sapienza” and Modena Universities; and advisor of the Consortium for Supercomputing Applications.

Prior to CNR in 1998, he spent 10 years at the IBM European Center for Scientific and Engineering Computing where he developed the IBM PVMe product and received two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards.

Enhance Max Payne 3, Diablo III with GeForce R300 Drivers

2012-05-24T18:11:25Z

Gamers: a couple of the hottest games of 2012, Diablo III and Max Payne 3, are now upon us. That means it’s time for some new GeForce R300 drivers.

Released today, the new NVIDIA GeForce R300 drivers are WHQL-certified and primed for both Diablo III and Max Payne 3. Looking for SLI, Ambient Occlusion, or FXAA? GeForce R300 drivers deliver those features in spades.

Download the new GeForce R300 drivers on GeForce.com.

We previously released a beta version of GeForce R300 drivers to give all you gamers out there an early look at the latest industry-defining features like NVIDIA FXAA, Adaptive VSync, and Frame Rate Target. We also highlighted numerous performance gains as high as 23 percent in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Today’s new GeForce R300 drivers (version 301.42) support all of the new GeForce GTX 600-series products, including GeForce GTX 690, GeForce GTX 680 and GeForce GTX 670. It also adds support for several new GeForce GT 600-series GPUs.

R300 highlights:

Boosts performance in several top PC games by up to 23 percent with a single GPU (tested on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) and by up to 23 percent with SLI (tested on Just Cause 2), when compared to the R295 drivers. Read our R300 article on GeForce.com for details and a complete list of performance increases.
Adds NVIDIA FXAA technology to the NVIDIA Control Panel, enabling ultra-fast anti-aliasing (up to 60 percent faster than MSAA).
Enables NVIDIA Adaptive VSync, which provides a smoother gaming experience by dynamically enabling and disabling vertical sync based on your current frame rate.
Enables NVIDIA Frame Rate Target in third-party applications, like EVGA Precision X, for automatic and dynamic adjustment of frame rate to a user-specified target.
Introduces several new NVIDIA Surround capabilities:

Add a fourth accessory display for access to email, web, or other applications while you game with GeForce GTX 600-series GPUs.
Maximize an application to a single physical display when in Surround mode.
Confine the Windows Taskbar to the center display.
Enable bezel peeking to temporarily peek behind the monitor bezels when using bezel-corrected resolutions.
Add or remove resolution settings from the list of Surround resolutions.
Full center display acceleration for single-wide display modes.

Adds or updates NVIDIA SLI support for numerous new games such as Max Payne 3, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Street Fighter X Tekken, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, Risen 2: Dark Waters and more.
Adds or updates NVIDIA 3D Vision support for several new games such as Dirt: Showdown (rated Good), World of Tanks (now rated Excellent), Oil Rush (rated 3D Vision Ready), Rayman Origins (rated Good), and Wargame: European Escalation (rated Good) and more.

For more details, refer to the release highlights on the driver download pages and read the GeForce R300 article on GeForce.com.

Enjoy the new GeForce R300 driver and let us know what you think.

Winners of Petaflop Supercomputer Contest Are…

2012-05-18T20:47:33Z

Two weeks ago, we posed an open-ended question to the research community: What scientific problems would you tackle with a petaflop supercomputer? Today, we reveal the three proposals selected to win exclusive early access to an NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU.

Contest entries came in from hundreds of researchers around the world. Their proposals ranged from societal challenges to advancing biofuels, from easing greenhouse gas emissions to preventing the next financial meltdown – all with a common aspiration to change the world.

The NVIDIA Tesla K20

The buzz around this contest reminds us that the pace of innovation is limited not by human imagination, but by computing resources. Oak Ridge National Lab recently told us that computing access on the upcoming TITAN supercomputer, powered by Tesla GPUs, is heavily oversubscribed – and the system isn’t even online yet.

This is where the Tesla K20 GPU can transform research. Using this GPU, based on our next-generation Kepler architecture, every research university could have access to petascale supercomputers, and speed up the pace of scientific discoveries.

After reviewing the flood of compelling proposals, our panel of academics handpicked three winning entries:

“Antiretroviral Therapies Against HIV-1”
Juan R. Perilla Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group

Summary: HIV-1 is increasingly acquiring new resistance to antiretroviral treatments. A petaflop supercomputer would help us see the complex dynamics that govern the space phase of the conical HIV capsid. The capsid protein plays critical roles in both late and early stages of the infection process and is widely viewed as an important unexploited therapeutic target that could offer the best hope of generating drugs that are active against all HIV-1 variants.

“Finding Biomarkers for Major Mental Disorders”
Stephen J. Glatt, Ph.D., SUNY Upstate Medical University
Director of Psychiatric Genetic Epidemiology & Neurobiology Laboratory (PsychGENe Lab)

Summary: PsychGENe Lab is working to find better ways to diagnose and prevent major mental disorders like autism, schizophrenia and many others. Discovery of additional risk genes and biomarkers for major mental disorders will, in turn, allow the development of personalized and more efficient treatments as well as earlier identification and prevention. A petaflop supercomputer would continually model existing and emerging datasets with more complex models that more likely resemble the true biological complexity underlying these insidious disorders.

“Tracking Oil Spills at Real Time for Immediate Cleanup Efforts”
Brandon Snow Richardson, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Stanford University

Summary: During an average flight to track progress of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, AVIRIS, an in-flight NASA instrument, would generate more than 135 GB of data, which would take a week to process and create abundance maps in a CPU cluster. My research has shown that GPUs significantly accelerate spectral decomposition, and a petascale computer with GPUs will instantaneously produce abundance maps to help cleanup crews immediately respond.

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all who participated in the contest!

GTC Wraps Up: By The Numbers

2012-05-22T00:17:28Z

The third GPU Technology Conference (GTC) ended Thursday much as it began – with a jam-packed keynote session, standing-room only break-out sessions and a small galaxy of schmooze-fests along the sidelines.

Indeed, the final sessions were as crowded as those on the morning of Day One.

NVIDIA used the event – which is designed to nurture the GPU ecosystem – to unveil some news of its own. It introduced two new Tesla processors based on next-generation Kepler technology architecture, one of which has more than 7 billion transistors. And it announced that it’s taking the GPU into the cloud with two initiatives, the VGX platform for enterprises to deliver virtualized desktops to any device across their network and the GeForce Grid for the delivery of flawless online gaming.

Another way of looking at GTC is by the numbers. The conference….

Drew nearly 3,000 attendees from 54 countries
Offered 340+ conference sessions in 34 disciplines
Displayed 120 academic posters about CUDA applications
Featured 100+ HPC-focused exhibitors
And, was filled with enough hyphenated, multi-syllabic Latinate words to baffle all but the uninitiated…

If you missed this year’s event, you can catch up on the GTC blog posts, here: http://blogs.nvidia.com/tag/gtc12. Watch the video below, for NVIDIA VP Ujesh Desai’s wrap-up from the show.

Join us next year, March 19-22, for GTC 2013. We’ll be right back here at the San Jose Convention Center.

Space: The Next, Though Not Final, Frontier for GPU’s

2012-05-17T23:52:11Z

Considering NASA completed multiple missions to the moon more than 40 years ago using the technological equivalent of chicken wire and duct tape, landing a robotic lunar rover with modern technology should be a pushover, right?

Not exactly, explained Robert Boehme and Wes Faler, of Part-Time Scientists, during their Day Three keynote address in front of a rapt audience at GTC. A modern mission still has to contend with temperature swings by 300 degrees Celsius and component-destroying lunar sand so fine it can penetrate “airtight” astronaut space suits. Not to mention 10-times the radiation from the sun than we experience on Earth.

Robert Boehme (blue) and Wes Faler (white) talk
about their quest to win the Google Lunar X Prize

The pair is part of a team of more than 100 volunteer scientists, engineers, researchers and students – even veterans of NASA’s Apollo missions – vying to win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, and the $30 million that comes with it. To succeed, the team needs to be the first privately funded team to safely land a rover on the surface of the moon, drive the rover at least 500 meters, and transmit detailed video, images and data back to Earth.

To help ensure its success, the Part-Time Scientists are relying on NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate the mission’s computationally intensive applications. This includes everything from simulating the landing craft’s final orbit and approach, to modeling the rover’s autonomous navigation of the lunar surface in one-sixth the Earth’s gravity – tasks that require hundreds of millions of computing runs to determine possible parameters and their effects.

Once their rover, named Asimov, has reached its destination, the processing and broadcasting of high-resolution video and images back to Earth will require more than 34 trillion floating point operations for the square kilometer the team expects the rover to explore.

Robert and Wes left a surprise for the end of the keynote. They revealed, to the delight of the audience, that Asimov will be a self-driving rover using NVIDIA GPUs to autonomously roam the moon. They then instructed the crowd to check under their seats for an even bigger surprise: one lucky keynote attendee would walk away from GTC 2012 with the Asimov Junior rover prototype.

NASA’s moon missions are famous for having helped bring into existence new technologies, like Teflon and Tang. Four decades on, NVIDIA’s GPU technology is helping volunteer rocket scientists every step of the way on a journey back into space.