Maingear announced their latest today, the Quantum Shift workstation. Designed more for the content developer then the gamer, the Quantum Shift definitely brings the heat. Of course, you customize exactly how much power the Quantum Shift is packing, but it’s designed around Nvidia’s Quadro FX GPU technology. → Read More
I’ve asked for some clarification from ArcSoft, or at the very least some larger screenshots, to settle this business, but haven’t gotten any word back yet. In the meantime, I’m going to call BS on this. Fine detail is a one-way street, and even the best upscaling software can’t make something out of nothing. The best you can do (which is fine with me) is to make the scaling process as clean as possible. But when you start trying to create detail where there isn’t any in the source, things get a bit pear-shaped. [Update: Got a hi-res shot. Still waiting to see it in action.] → Read More
NVIDIA is known primarily for their PC graphics cards, but they’ve been in the news recently both for the expansion of their CUDA and PhysX initiatives as well as (allegedly) developing a CPU to challenge Intel and AMD. They’ve been proponents of parallel processing for quite a while, naturally, and have made some investments in companies like MotionDSP and Elemental Technologies, both of which are developing software that really leverages the GPU.
The success of these investments is difficult to measure (NVIDIA’s been hit as hard as the other semiconductor-related companies, losing 50% of its revenue), but it’s hard to argue with the fact that parallel computing is where practically the entire industry is heading. In light of this, NVIDIA has started what they’re calling the GPU Ventures Program, by which they hope to “identify, support and invest” in companies that are working on GPU-based computing applications. → Read More
If you’re really in a hurry to “recover” that password from the WPA-secured wi-fi network you’re “sharing” with a neighbor, you’re going to be waiting a long time for that brute force crack to work on your old traditional processor. Why not make yourself a tool using NVIDIA’s parallel processing environment CUDA and run it on a nice GeForce GTX 280 series? That’ll decrease your wait time by quite a bit, as these guys proved. In fact, it increased the speed at which they could recover a password by 10,000%. That’s not to say you can just grab passwords out of the air, of course, and WPA is still as secure as it was yesterday, but if someone sets their mind to cracking your network, it’s going to take them about a hundredth of the time now if they set it up right. Not exactly the best PR, but I think NVIDIA will take what they can get right now. Update: UberGizmo has more information. What, it’s Friday and I’m lazy to begin with! → Read More
http://www.viddler.com/player/d0635151/ Remember that MotionDSP stuff we talked about a few weeks ago? No? Let me refresh your memory: it’s a process — extremely CPU intensive, I’m thinking — by which video data is thoroughly analyzed and enhanced, reducing things like noise, stutters, color and contrast issues, and so on. TechCrunch mentioned it as being a web service, but now the MotionDSP guys are working with NVIDIA to port the processing engine to CUDA, which they say has resulted in major performance gains. Point being, this may be something you can do at home now instead of uploading it to be processed remotely in their clusters. They say “real time” is now possible locally but I’m sure there’s a resolution or bitrate limit on that; this won’t be for clearing up glitches on 720p TV rips, but you might be able to use it to enhance some of those YouTube FLVs or jittery iSight videos. Two more demo vids after the hump. → Read More
