Nvision

Is visual computing responsible for Sarah Palin and Joe Biden?

The NVision Conference, held last week in San Jose, has had such an eye-opening effect on me that I have been unable to sleep.

The things those clever scientific people have come up with make me realize that the world as we know it is no longer the world as we know it.

I was particularly moved to hear about an Israeli company called OptiTex.

Their fashion design optical gizmography is so realistic that designers can observe on screen just how the fabrics will shimmy and shake even before the couture gown has been cut and shaped.

I was struck … Read more

Viewsonic demos 120Hz desktop LCD at NVISION 2008

Viewsonic showed off a 22-inch, 120Hz desktop LCD display prototype at NVISION 2008 on Monday in San Jose, Calif.

While most computer LCD displays refresh at 60Hz, the Viewsonic prototype achieves virtually double the refresh rate, which can be beneficial when watching a movie. Since the 24 frames per second (fps) framerate that film is shot at can be evenly divided into 120Hz, it makes for a smoother framerate than what you get with a 60Hz display, especially during action scenes.

In my experience, movies running at 120Hz look like video as opposed to film and takes away from that … Read more

Nvidia conference is all about the other processor

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Nvidia is making a case for the graphics processing unit, the other chip inside the PC, at the Nvision conference that opened on Monday.

In his inaugural keynote--this is first Nvision conference--Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang reminded the audience that the graphics processing unit (GPU) has come a long way. In short, the GPU has evolved from the simple fixed-function graphics accelerator (e.g., the IBM 8514 that debuted in 1987) to the modern graphics chip, a computing engine capable of almost one teraflop of processing power. (A teraflop is equal to one trillion floating point operations per … Read more

Larrabee performance--beyond the sound bite

Hello, Slashdot.

In a story on PC Pro, Nvidia architect John Montrym (whose name was incorrectly spelled "Mottram") quoted my recent blog post on Larrabee as concluding that "the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."

Alas, this isn't really what I said or meant.

What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage...graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself--running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.

Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that… Read more