Bells and whistles
Graphics giant NVIDIA today unveiled the culmination of a message it's been telling us for a while now: that you can do a lot more with a GPU than just process graphics. It takes the form of a marketing campaign entitled "Force Within".
We have been assured by sources within NVIDIA that the timing of the releases has nothing to do with the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, which has reclaimed the overall speed crown from NVIDIA, and has more to do with coinciding with Siggraph and avoiding the Intel Developer Forum and NVISION. Just a coincidence then...
The main features of Force Within are as follows:
CUDA - A set programming tools to enable developers to make application that run on the GPU rather than the CPU.
PhysX - The processing of physical interactions in games
3D Stereo - A way of making games appear to be 3D
SLI - Not new, but the multi-graphics card platform is being promoted in this context to encourage a set up with each card dedicated to one of the above tasks.
These products are free to download and are available on all NVIDIA GPUs from the 8 series onwards, so the aim of all this appears to be for NVIDIA to show consumers all the reasons why buying their stuff is a good idea over and above raw graphics processing power.
