What that means is that you can have up to 3 Nvidia Quadro FX based cards, giving you a GPU accelerated system that can pretty much take whatever you can throw at it. This workstation was conceived and designed specifically for the new Adobe Creative Suite, and allows up to 30 FPS in Premiere Pro. Expect to pay a premium for a machine this fast though, the Quantum Shift starts around $3,399, and goes up from there depending on how you want it customized.

From the press release:

Union, New Jersey – April 12, 2010 – MAINGEAR Computers, award-winning builders of custom computers for PC gamers, enthusiasts, and creative professionals, unveils the Quantum SHIFT Workstation, an everyday super computer that exceeds the demands of the most power hungry graphics professionals. Fully optimized for Adobe CS5, the SHIFT employs up to three NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics cards to enable a GPU accelerated Adobe Creative Suite that allows you to design with creative precision. SHIFT’s unique vertical heat-stack design ensures that your Quadro equipment remains cool and quiet no matter how intense your tasks may be.

With Adobe CS5 powered by MAINGEAR, you can navigate images like never before with GPU-accelerated scrubby zoom, bird’s eye zoom, and 3D modeling. Also, GPU-accelerated color picker, color dropper and real time brush resizing give you immersive interaction with your canvas. The CUDA-accelerated Mercury Engine in Premiere Pro gives post-production houses the power to edit more than 3 layers and multiple effects in real-time. With Quadro’s GPU acceleration in Premiere Pro, playback of two layers HDV and effects can be accelerated in real time on the GPU. At nearly 30 frames per second. Compare that to 2.2 frames per second on the CPU only.

“Adobe CS5 fully leverages the advantages of NVIDIA’s Quadro FX GPU accelerated technology,” said Wallace Santos, CEO and Founder of MAINGEAR. “Quantum SHIFT optimizes both technologies with enhanced performance and airflow, providing creative professionals with the most advanced workstation PC ever created.”

In addition, the new GeForce GTX 480 brings an unprecedented amount of professional power to the table. If you’re looking for the ability to playback three layers of HD, and twice the performance of a GTX 285 in CS5, the SHIFT with GeForce GTX 480 is a powerhouse editing product.

“Adobe CS5 powered by GeForce GTX 480 hardware has enabled us to achieve same-day edits with our in-house video production,” said Chris Morley, CTO of MAINGEAR. “In seven years of designing and selling high definition post production workstations, I’ve never seen so much get done in so little time and for so little money. The ROI with SHIFT powered by NVIDIA running Adobe CS5 is amazing.”

[Update: Got a hi-res shot. Still waiting to see it in action.]

ArcSoft claims that using CUDA, they can perform the huge amount of calculation necessary to make usable 1080p video out of 480p. Now, resizing cleanly on the fly is one thing, and totally doable. Otherwise all our video would look like garbage, and the NES games I play would be all pixelated. Check out these three shots of the Contra title screen. One is actual pixels, one is blown up with no filter, and the third is blown up with a 2xSaI filter. (click for full size)

What ArcSoft is promising is related to this process, the way we’re related to chimps. But that doesn’t mean it can do what they say. They promise an “HD-like viewing experience,” which sounds innocuous, but when you show a picture like the one at the top of the article, you better be able to back it up. Speaking of which, it looks suspiciously like the image on the right had a filter put on it to make the image at the left, instead of vice versa. In fact, let’s see what that would look like. The “original” image is on the left in the top row, the “processed” image is on the right:

Wow. So, basically, I’ll believe this phantom tech when I see it. Maybe the shots they’ve put up are just mock-ups, but that would be really irresponsible when you’re selling your product based on image quality. I’d love to be proven wrong, and their idea of salvaging information from multiple frames (thus requiring CUDA) is good, but I think they’re making promises they can’t keep.

Update: They got back to me with a high-resolution picture. I’ve embedded a crop below. I leave it to you to determine its BS/reality ratio. Personally, I don’t buy it.

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. A ton of GPU-accelerated (or simply parallel-ready) applications can be found here at the Cuda website, including image manipulation, physics simulation, and advanced computation.

They’re hoping to draw some of the best startups and the minds within to NVIDIA as a sort of parallel processing father figure. A couple million here, maybe a peek at the new hardware there, and they’ve got themselves a pretty solid partner. I talked with Jeff Herbst, VP of business development there, who outlined the idea of it. It’s very much an investment thing and not some sort of “GPU App Store.” They’re hoping that VCs might like to get in early on what NVIDIA thinks is the next phase of computing. Personally, I was already convinced by the kind of interesting work being done by their partners already, but Mr. Herbst has been talking with many more companies and is planning on expanding their Emerging Companies Summit this fall.

The site is just launching today (any moment now…), and hopefully it’ll be populated with the kinds of hot young startups that tech investors love to just run their hands over.

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!

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.

The video above shows MotionDSP stabilization.

Below, frame interpolation (great when it works, but interpolation can go horribly wrong)

Lastly, cleaning up bad exposure and noise (noise not really visible at this res):