NVIDIA Launches the GeForce 9 Series Motherboard GPUs
NVIDIA just announced a couple of motherboard GPUs (integrated graphics) named GeForce 9300 and GeForce 9400. Yes they are the ones that Apple use in their new laptops, and what's good for Apple's laptop is also good to build an entry-level consumer PC - or the perfect home-theater PC. The idea is that you don't have to pay $100 for a graphics card to get decent graphics anymore - it will already be on the motherboard.
Put simply, the GeForce 9300 and 9400 can easily handle HD video playback (with PowerDVD), video and music encoding (via Badaboom) and entry-level gaming. NVIDIA says that this chip has five times the graphics performance of its competitor (the Intel G45) - I can believe it (I've seen it in action), and so does Apple. It has 16-cores, which is far from the 256-cores of the GTX280, but it is surprisingly enough to run games like Crysis, with reduced levels of detail, but at playable frame-rates.
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The more interesting topic however is CUDA. With NVIDIA's general-purpose compute language, applications can use the GPU to encode audio and video much faster than CPUs. If you plug a discrete graphics card, you can still use the motherboard GPU to handle game physics. That's pretty cool too. What I would do with it is to build a (relatively) low-cost Media Center PC. With full hardware acceleration of Blu-Ray 1.1, H.264 and MPEG-2, the GeForce Series 9 can handle HD video without requiring a high-end CPU. That's key to building a silent home-theater system.
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There's one catch: software integration. Right now, all this power can be tapped into by using specific software: PowerDVD, Badaboom. That's not good enough and I hope that in the future, all that power can be tapped-in via native Windows libraries and applications like Windows Media Player (and therefore Windows Media Center). Now that Apple is using NVIDIA GPUs from top-to-bottom, I expect Max OS Snow Leopard to be the first system to integrate GPU computing. That will hopefully force Microsoft to follow... it's about time we start using these cores that we paid for.
source: ubergizmo
NVIDIA Introduces New GeForce 9400M - Highly Integrated GPU
Demand for better visual computing performance continues to grow as more and more applications tap the massively parallel processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for more than just graphics. As gamers, video enthusiasts, designers, and now creative professionals require optimized PC solutions, the NVIDIA® GeForce® 9400M GPU brings a 5x performance increase over integrated core-logic to today’s sleek notebook designs.
“Today marks a flashpoint for users around the world,” said Jeff Fisher, senior vice president, GPU business at NVIDIA. “With this new GPU, NVIDIA is able to expand its market footprint from gamers and design professionals to the creative generation of users, as well as firmly establish us at the heart of the fastest growing PC market—the notebook PC.”
NVIDIA also announced today that Apple has adopted this revolutionary new GPU for its incredible new Apple MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air. Apple and NVIDIA have worked together to harness the massive parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs to deliver a rich visual experience for consumers on the go.
“The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M architecture delivers an ideal combination of visual computing horsepower and energy efficiency in a single, highly-integrated package that we're using to bring a whole new level of graphics performance to our MacBook users,” said David Moody, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing.
About the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU:
The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M is a single chip, high performance, highly integrated design that is ideal for notebooks and smaller computing devices. It features 16 parallel processing cores that deliver a whopping 54 GFLOPs of processing power, making it the most powerful integrated GPU on the market today. It also delivers up to 5x faster graphics performance than Intel Centrino 2*, and long-lasting battery power, allowing consumers to watch a complete, full-length HD movie on a single charge.
