Computex 2009 Day 1: NVIDIA news, and an update to a game no-one really cares about.
Computex is a hugely wild experience - we've just flown in and hit the ground running, hearing what NVIDIA had to say about their latest releases in the GPU world.
The answer? Not a lot. We got a lot of news about how GPGPU programming was the inevitable wave of the future, and that it's happening in 2009 - but they've also said that each previous year too.
Sure NVIDIA's ION platform is shown off (with some very svelte mobos held by booth babes) well in specific benchmarks against CPUs, but the fineprint will mention that the tests are incredibly multithreaded, and most importantly of all they're run against an Intel Atom chip.
NVIDIA went on to announce a brand-new feature in Windows 7, which will enable drag&drop encoding of video files through CUDA. This was actually really neat, and a great idea for those mobile fiends who need their content on the run.
They mentioned their Windows 7 drivers already being WHQL'd, and then threw up the usual graph showing a potential speed increase etc etc etc.
Perhaps most interesting of NVIDIA's conference was that they announced their PhysX tech would be used in the expansion pack to the Terminator Salvation game on PC. Why they'd bother releasing an expansion pack for a dull game is beyond us for now, but check the shots in the gallery for some very pretty explosions (and oddly hung rags everywhere).
Issue: 107 | December, 2009