News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

February 26, 2008

geekery

Run programs… on your video card

Posted Feb. 26, ’08, 7:07 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Geekery

CUDA Video cards in personal computers are quickly becoming computer powerhouses, especially when compared to the host computer itself. In order to fuel all that multimedia and those oh-so-real video games, video cards have to be powerful and fast. For many users, the video card impacts the user experience far more than a couple hundred megahertz in the CPU.

It’s not surprising then that some people are actually interested in tapping that power for uses other than pretty pictures. Nvidia understands this and has offered CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), a development environment geared to deploying software that runs in their video cards. It allows software to be written specifically to be run on the cards, not for existing software to run on them, in case you started having delusions of grandeur.

There are some caveats (such as requiring an “8 series” model or greater), but that dream that some researchers with parallel computing needs have held can finally be fulfilled. What’s new and even greater is that it’s available for Mac. I find the news encouraging as it’s a sign of Nvidia’s commitment to our favorite platform.

[via Ars Technica]


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