Performance boost for games and OpenGL

Nvidia has released a new set of WHQL certified drivers with support for all Geforce GPUs ranging from Geforce 6 to Geforce 200 series, as well as the ION IGP. The new driver mainly brings performance boost in various games and the most important new feature is the support for OpenGL 3.2 on Geforce 8, 9, 100, 200 series and Nvidia's ION GPUs.

The performance boost includes ARMA 2, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood with SLI, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Prototype, and of course, Batman: Arkham Asylum when GPU PhysX is enabled. The performance boost ranges from eight percent in Batman to up to 50 percent in Call of Juarez. The performance boost results are taken from the 191.07 vs. 190.62 comparison.

The new driver also brings SLI support for Aion, Darkfall, Dawn of Magic 2, Dreamkiller, Fuel, Need for Speed: Shift and bunch of other titles. In addition to these performance boosts, the new driver also brings numerous bug fixes.

The new driver can be downloaded at Nvidia's website, here.

Nvidia Corp. has demonstrated one of the first products based on its newly-announced Fermi architecture. The first card, which pictures appeared on Japanese PC Watch web-site, based on the graphics processing unit (GPU) known as G300, GT300 or NV60 is apparently not a GeForce, but Tesla, which is designer for high-performance computing or simulation market.

According to info that we managed to get from Nvidia, GPU accelerated flash will be officially introduced on October 5th.

The guys from notebookjournal.de have posted a Youtube video showing an internal flash player build running a trailer of the latest Star Trek movie in 720p. The trailer was running on an ION-based netbook which had no trouble in pulling off smooth playback.

As real as it can get. Nvidia will show its DirectX 11 card that we used to call GT300 and that everyone internally calls Fermi. The hardware is real and we will learn much more about it tomorrow. We expect that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will demonstrate the card at the GTC keynote that should start at 1.00 PM Pacific time or roughly 10 PM Central European time.

Fermi will concentrate a lot of a computing processing and it should be very fast with DirectX 11 and older games. Fermi has a lot of cache and supports instructions that use to be common only for CPU and many people believe that this is a hybrid between a graphics card and a CPU. This might be the direction that Nvidia will be heading.

Nvidia launched its second-generation GPU computing architecture on Wednesday, code-named "Fermi". Oak Ridge National Laboratory will design a supercomputer based on the Fermi, an executive said.

The "Fermi" announcement kicked off Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference, which will run the remainder of this week in Silicon Valley.

There is a rather lively discussion in our forums about NVIDIA’s recent decision to disable PhysX when an ATI card is present in your system. This all started with the release of NVIDIA’s 186+ drivers and, if you follow the link in the forums, you’ll see where the reasoning behind the decision is explained by NVIDIA’s customer care center.

Nvidia supports GPU accelerated Physx on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes Physx a great experience for customers. For a variety of reasons - some development expense some quality assurance and some business reasons NVIDIA will not support GPU accelerated Physx with NVIDIA GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non- NVIDIA GPUs.

Customers are apparently shouting at graphics chip makers to do more about correcting memory systems.

One of the downsides of the current generation of GPUs is a lack of error correction which causes problems for high performance users. According to HPC Wire, Graphics chip vendors are aware of the problem and it appears to be only a matter of time before GPUs get a memory makeover.