Cardinal Forums

My geek son in law put me onto these drivers so if you search the nVidia site, you won't likely find them. But if you have one of the new 8 or 9 series cards (and perhaps older cards as well), you might give these a try. They seem very stable on my 9800 GTX card and give me some nice, stable views. I'll report back on framerates tomorrow.

YOu can find them at the nVidia website by searching for CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). It takes advantage of the massive parallel high performance processing power of the newer graphics cards by using the hundreds of stream or thread processors of the new cards. This is a hint of things to come (they claim) as CPU speeds have hit near the top and multi-cores are now the only way to increase performance. But to use multi-core CPUs you must parallel process and multi-thread. For example, the 8 and 9 series cards each have 128 thread processors each capable of managing 96 concurrent threads (that's 12,288 threads). Since nVidia uses an API instruction set above the bit level itself, it is easier for programmers to write applications than with some other architectures. nVidia is also travelling this road in response to the ATI/AMD merger and it should keep them well in front by allowing off-loading of instructions to the GPU. With the ATI/AMD architecture, instructions are less flexible and code writing more difficult. Plus, any change in the CPU/GPU instruction set will obsolete many older programs. Not so when off-loading instructions to the GPU independently.

Anyway, the CUDA drivers look very very good from here. I'll report more tomorrow.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_what_is.html

Just completed a flight from Medford, OR to Winkle Bar (OR74) -- which is a challenge by the way. Little grass strip in a small valley, short with drops on both ends. Come in slowly with a small aircraft and be ready to slam brakes when you touch down.

But I digress. Flight went very well despite some early morning fog and limited visibility. No graphics glitches and no problems with multiple view switching using the new CUDA beta drivers. These are designed for scientific number crunching work, but seem to be rock solid and very stable -- better so far than the last 175.xx official drivers. I've been in and out of Firefox and numerous web sites with no issues whatsoever. Framerates are still way up there, maybe even better than before although there are so many variables when using real weather that I don't know I can say for sure. I also need to lock my framerate counter to average rather than instantaneous mode so I can see what's happening. So far, so good.