Tag: nvidia

“Cloud gaming” has a future—just maybe not in the cloud

Nvidia’s Shield tablet can stream full PC games from your Steam library as long as you’re using a GeForce graphics card. This may be the best way to stream your PC games to your tablet. Andrew Cunningham In practically every one of its major press conferences since last year’s GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia has reminded us that they want to virtualize the graphics processor. The company wants to take it out of the computer on your lap or on your desk and put it into a server somewhere without you noticing the difference. It introduced the concept at GTC 2012. Then over the course of the next year, Nvidia unveiled the actual graphics cards that would enable this tech, started selling them to partners, and also stuck them in Nvidia Grid-branded servers aimed at both gamers and businesses . The difference between Nvidia’s initiatives and more traditional virtualization is that the company’s products support relatively few users for the hardware they require. The Grid gaming server supports 24 users per server box and the Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) only supports eight or 16 depending on the model. Most virtualization is all about dynamically allocating resources like CPU cycles and RAM to give as many users as possible the bare minimum amount of power they need. Instead, Nvidia’s is about providing a fixed number of users with a pretty specific amount of computing power, thus attempting to recreate the experience of using a regular old computer. There are situations where this makes sense. Given the cost of buying and maintaining workstation hardware, Nvidia’s argument for the VCA seems more or less convincing. But I’m slightly less optimistic about the prospect for the Grid gaming server, or any cloud gaming service, really—call it leftover skepticism from OnLive’s meltdown earlier this year . Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Cloud gaming” has a future—just maybe not in the cloud

NVIDIA reveals Volta next-gen GPU platform

We’re here at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, and company CEO Jen Hsun-Huang has just revealed the next step in its GPU roadmap. Called Volta, it’s scheduled to arrive after Maxwell , and will advance GPU technology with a ridiculous amount of memory bandwidth. Volta GPUs will have access to up to 1TB per second of bandwidth by stacking the DRAM on top of the GPU itself, with a silica substrate between them. Then, by cutting a hole through the silicon and connecting each layer it’s possible to move, according to Huang “all of the data from a full Blu-Ray disc through the chip in 1/50th of a second.” We aren’t exactly sure what that means for graphics, but being able to process data that quickly is bound to be a boon for gamers… whenever Volta actually arrives, of course. Filed under: Desktops , Gaming , Laptops Comments

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NVIDIA reveals Volta next-gen GPU platform

NVIDIA Tegra 4 benchmarked, breaks all sorts of speed records (video)

When NVIDIA unveiled Tegra 4 back at CES, we scrambled to get hands-on with a reference device. And though our initial performance impressions were positive — it runs 1080p video and games smoothly — there was only so much we could say to illustrate how fast the performance is. After all, Tegra 3 already does a fine job handling games and full HD movies. What we really needed were benchmarks, some quantitative data to help show the difference between Tegra 4 devices and whatever’s currently on the market. Fortunately for all of you, we just got our chance: here at Mobile World Congress, the company has reference tablets set up expressly for the purpose of running tests. So, we did just that… over and over and over until we had a long list of scores. Meet us after the break to see how it fared. Filed under: Tablets , Mobile , NVIDIA Comments

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NVIDIA Tegra 4 benchmarked, breaks all sorts of speed records (video)

NVIDIA unveils the GTX Titan, an enormous graphics card that costs $1,000 (eyes-on)

NVIDIA’s GTX Titan is rumor no more , as the American computer hardware company unveiled the superpowerful graphics card this morning. With 2,688 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 RAM, and 7.1 billion transistors packed into the 10.5-inch frame, Titan’s capable of pushing 4,500 Gigaflops of raw power — NVIDIA’s pitching Titan as the means to “power the world’s first gaming supercomputers.” The company even showed off the Titan in its mightiest form, bootstrapped to two others running together (three-way SLI), which powers graphics showcase Crysis 3 running at its highest settings: a whopping 5760×1080 resolution across three monitors. Of course, a setup like that would cost you quite a pretty penny; just one GTX Titan costs $1,000, not to mention three (nor all the other hardware required to support it). Should you prefer your gaming PCs to not be of the neon-lit, triple GPU, above-$10,000 variety, NVIDIA was also showing off the Titan in a Falcon Northwest boutique PC. The company’s working with a variety of boutique PC makers to incorporate the Titan (see: Maingear ), making NVIDIA’s top of the line a teensy bit more accessible to your average joe. GTX Titan is the new top of the line for NVIDIA, effectively pushing aside the GTX 690 and setting a new benchmark for performance. Of course, with a $1,000 price tag and freedom — nay, encouragement — to tweak its nitty gritty settings, the Titan isn’t really meant for your average anyone. The PC game-playing early adopters, however? Here’s your next GPU. Hopefully you’ve got a big, empty space in your rig, as you’ll need it. The GTX Titan arrives on February 25th for $999. Gallery: NVIDIA GTX Titan Filed under: Misc , Gaming , NVIDIA Comments

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NVIDIA unveils the GTX Titan, an enormous graphics card that costs $1,000 (eyes-on)

NVIDIA unveils Project Shield, a Tegra 4-powered Android gaming handheld

A video shown on-stage during NVIDIA’s press conference just unveiled “Project Shield,” a gaming controller / portable console running the just announced Tegra 4 . The controller looks an awful lot like a PlayStation 3 DualShock 3, albeit with an HD screen attached. NVIDIA’s promising 38 hours of gaming out of the rechargeable lithium ion batteries built-in, a swanky audio system “on par with” jamboxes, and a full-on Android gaming experience. A micro SD sits next to an HDMI output, one USB port, and a standard eighth inch audio jack, directly below the customizable 5-inch “retinal display” touchscreen. Update : It’s a 1,280 x 720 screen at 294 dpi, for the record. NVIDIA’s hoping Shield will replace your average controller as well — perhaps with that newly detailed Grid system ? — and company CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off its use in-tandem with a swanky LG 4K television on-stage, navigating through media without pause. He also gave us a taste of a few games running on it ( Blood Sword: Sword of Ruin and a boxing title) via NVIDIA’s Tegrazone gaming store. But beyond just Android games we’ve already seen, still-in-development Unreal Engine 3 title Hawken was also given a multiplayer run, and looked notably more attractive than the previous two titles. As good as the handheld’s newfangled Tegra 4 chip seems to be, it still can’t hold a candle to Nvidia’s own GTX 680 — Huang explained that the Shield can play more than just Tegrazone games — it can take over your gaming PC, too. He explained that Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software can pipe PC gaming to the handheld over your local network, giving Shield owners access to their Steam library ( navigatable by Big Picture Mode , of course) directly from the device. It looks like users will be able to purchase PC games through Tegrazone, too. Huang showed the crowd Need for Speed: Most Wanted running in real-time on the device. It’s … well, it’s really impressive. There’s little (if any) perceptible lag, and this is a racing game we’re seeing (as in that lag really matters). The next game up is Assassin’s Creed 3 , which looks similarly impressive on the Shield’s 5-inch screen. Finally, we’re seeing Steam launched directly from Tegrazone, and it launches directly into Big Picture Mode. Beyond just playing games via streaming, it looks like we’ll be able to buy them directly on Steam, through Shield. We’ll be getting a closer look at Project Shield later this week, and we’ll be sure to put it through its paces. Oh, and we’ll ask for a price and release window, as we’ve yet to hear official word on either . Can’t wait? Tide yourself over with NVIDIA’s official press release after the break. Update 2: NVIDIA tells us Project Shield’s roughly in the beta stage of development, and currently doesn’t include an LTE radio (WiFi only). It’s running Jelly Bean at the moment, but may change by the time it’s expected to ship, in “Q2 2013.” Still no word on pricing, sadly. Gallery: NVIDIA Project Shield Joseph Volpe and Sean Buckley contributed to this report Continue reading NVIDIA unveils Project Shield, a Tegra 4-powered Android gaming handheld Filed under: Gaming , Handhelds , HD , Mobile , NVIDIA Comments

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NVIDIA unveils Project Shield, a Tegra 4-powered Android gaming handheld

NVIDIA officially unveils Tegra 4: offers quad-core Cortex A15, 72 GPU cores, LTE support

One new SoC per year? That’s what NVIDIA pledged back in the fall of 2010 and today at its CES 2013 presser, it delivered with the Tegra 4’s official unveiling. The chip, which retains the same 4-plus-1 arrangement of its predecessor, arrives with a whopping 72 GeForce GPU cores — effectively offering six times the Tegra 3’s visual output and is based on the 28nm process. It also is the first quad-core processor with Cortex A15 cores on-board, and offers compatibility with LTE networks through an optional chip. NVIDIA claims this piece of silicon is the world’s fastest mobile processor, and showed a demonstration in which a Tegra 4 went head-to-head against a Nexus 10 in loading websites (you can guess which one won). The Tegra 4 also introduces new computational photography architecture, which adds a new engine to drive the image processing and significantly improve the amount of time it takes to calculate the necessary mathematics 10 times faster than current platforms. To show off its power, NVIDIA demonstrated HDR rendering on live video. The chip is also capable of implementing HDR in burst shots and with LED flash. The idea, NVIDIA says, is to eventually make our mobile cameras more powerful than DSLRs, and this is certainly a step in the right direction. Gallery: NVIDIA CES 2013 press event Joseph Volpe contributed to this report. Continue reading NVIDIA officially unveils Tegra 4: offers quad-core Cortex A15, 72 GPU cores, LTE support Filed under: Cellphones , Tablets , Wireless , Mobile , NVIDIA Comments

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NVIDIA officially unveils Tegra 4: offers quad-core Cortex A15, 72 GPU cores, LTE support

NVIDIA details the Grid, a card built for powering cloud computing

NVIDIA’s CES 2013 press conference is still ongoing, but the chipmaker is already unveiling something we’ve only seen teased before: the NVIDIA Grid, a card used for cloud computing across PCs, smart TVs, and smartphones. CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang detailed the new card on-stage, which you can see above in a rack of 20 grid servers. Huang says the rack pushes out roughly 240 NVIDIA GPUs worth of power, or about 200 teraflops — equivalent to approximately 700 Xbox 360s. The Grid was given a tease earlier this year ; the card will assist in pushing serious horsepower to the cloud, so that gaming over the air, across multiple devices becomes a less complicated reality. During an on-stage demonstration, NVIDIA showed Frozenbyte’s Trine running on various devices, all powered by the Grid system. Beyond just looking great, it carried over seamlessly between multiple devices. Huang also detailed NVIDIA’s first partners for Grid: Agawi, Cloudunion, Cyber Cloud, G-cluster, Playcast, and Ubitus. Apparently biggies like OnLive and Gaikai are already all set? We’ll be sure to get a closer look in the coming days as CES rages on. Continue reading NVIDIA details the Grid, a card built for powering cloud computing Comments

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NVIDIA details the Grid, a card built for powering cloud computing

NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor details leaked: 4-plus-1 cores, 28nm, six times the power of Tegra 3

NVIDIA’s next superhero-themed mobile chipset has possibly made an early appearance in a leaked side in China, and it looks like it wants to go toe-to-toe with the latest processors from Samsung and Qualcomm. The Tegra 4 (codenamed Wayne) will apparently offer the same power-efficient 28nm process found on its Snapdragon rival and according to the slide from Chip Hell , there’s a dizzying 72-core graphics setup. That’s apparently 20 times the power found the Tegra 2 and six times that in the last-generation Tegra 3, which powered, among other devices, the Nexus 7 . Those graphics cores will be able to power screens up to 2,560 x 1600, with 1080p output at 120Hz, while the leak also mentions 4K — if only in passing. We won’t see any increase in CPU cores this time, with the same 4-plus-1 setup , but we are likely seeing a move to ARM’s latest design, the Cortex-A15 . It’ll also catch up with USB 3.0, being NVIDIA’s first mobile chip to do so, alongside dual-channel DDR3L memory. We’ve reached out to chipmaker and we’ll let you know when we hear more, but it’s highly likely we’ll be seeing this next-generation processor early next year — say, at a mobile trade show . Filed under: Cellphones , Tablets , Mobile , NVIDIA Comments Via: Mobile Geeks Source: Chip Hell

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NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor details leaked: 4-plus-1 cores, 28nm, six times the power of Tegra 3

NVIDIA gets a little help from Valve, tweaks GeForce drivers just as Steam for Linux beta launches

NVIDIA and Linux haven’t always been the most welcoming of bedfellows, but Valve seems to be defrosting that relationship somewhat. The Half Life maker has helped NVIDIA to tweak its 600 series GeForce drivers to reduce games’ loading times when used on Linus’ operating system . The R310 drivers are said to double performance when using Steam for Linux , which openes for beta today, meaning that you can try and survive twice as many zombie apocalypses in Left 4 Dead than you could a week ago. Continue reading NVIDIA gets a little help from Valve, tweaks GeForce drivers just as Steam for Linux beta launches Filed under: Desktops , Gaming , NVIDIA NVIDIA gets a little help from Valve, tweaks GeForce drivers just as Steam for Linux beta launches originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink    |   |  Email this  |  Comments

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NVIDIA gets a little help from Valve, tweaks GeForce drivers just as Steam for Linux beta launches