NVIDIA GPU Conference

We are sitting down at the NVIDIA GPU Conference in San Jose, California (Live Webcast is linked on this page.) listening to Senior Vice President Dan Vivoli talk about how far reaching the word of GPU computing is going to be in the future. But I can't help but wonder about issues that are a bit more evident to the hardware enthusiast and gamer. Where is NVIDIA's next generation technology for the gamer? What is NVIDIA's answer to ATI Eyefinity technology? Why does NVIDIA detect AMD GPUs in Batman: AA and turn off AntiAliasing? Why do new NVIDIA drivers punish AMD GPU owners who want to leverage an NVIDIA card to compute PhysX? Hmmm.

Most interesting is that NVIDIA is showing off some demos with incredible fidelity, namely a Bugatti Veyron, that cannot be distinguished from an actual photograph. Sadly though, it does take about 18 seconds to render a single frame using ray tracing, and most disappointing is that this is being demonstrated on the currently available retail GPUs. No next generation is being shown off at NVIDIA's biggest event of the year. That said, the tech used to render the car is incredibly impressive and we remember that not very long ago it would take a bank of computers hours to do this.

Jensen Huang does make some incredibly efficient points about parallel computation possibly using a GPU as a co-processor though. There is no doubt in my mind that GPUs will find a huge place in our economy as a needed component, but all this makes me think that NVIDIA is on the way out as a gaming company and on the way in as a "CPU" company.

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