Five Nvidia CUDA-Enabled Apps Tested 134
crazipper writes "Much fuss has been made about Nvidia's CUDA technology and its general-purpose computing potential. Now, in 2009, a steady stream of launches from third-party software developers sees CUDA gaining traction at the mainstream. Tom's Hardware takes five of the most interesting desktop apps with CUDA support and compares the speed-up yielded by a pair of mainstream GPUs versus a CPU-only. Not surprisingly, depending on the workload you throw at your GPU, you'll see results ranging from average to downright impressive."
Tied to a card (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why people hype a technology that is tied to a specific manufacturer of card. If nvidia died tomorrow, we'd have a fair amount of code thats no longer relevant, unless there was some way to design cards that are CUDA-capable but not nvidia.
Also worth noting that I'd completely forgotten CUDA even ran on windows, as I've only heard it in the context of linux recently.
Re:Tied to a card (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenCL will hopefully help to set a solid ground for GPU and CPU parallel computing, and since it is not technically very different from CUDA, porting existing applications to OpenCL will not be a challenge. Nowadays with current massively parallel technology the hardest part is making the algorithms parallel, not programming any specific device.
Re:Nice, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it matter? Linux is not anywhere close to the target market,
Linux support for CUDA matters hugely, Linux boxes are head and shoulders above any other market for CUDA-based software. That's because linux is the OS for supercomputing nowadays and CUDA's biggest niche is the exact same kind of number crunching that is typically associated with supercomputer workloads.
In fact, these GPUs are yet another example of how there is nothing new under the sun. A GPU is very much like the vector processor of Cray-style supercomputing (when Cray was still alive that is) aka SIMD (single instruction, multiple data). [wikipedia.org]
Re:Tom's Hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
To be honest, it's all about advertising.
C'mon, 15 pages? You wonder why few of us ever RTFA...
Make Slashdot linked articles direct to a single page version, with maybe a handful of ads, and we may stick around and look at the rest of your site. Otherwise, it's potentially 1 million readers who may not bother clicking the URL, or just skip to the conclusion and miss the point of the article - perhaps hurting sales of advertised nvidia cards, the crux of the article's technology.
Re:Tom's Hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
Definitely YES, if it's an article worth viewing. I mightn't think I'm interested in a topic, only to find I am. :) Clicking a link after a screen only disrupts one's concentration, while the next page loads, when most of us just use a scroll wheel. And as far as revenue goes, you can fill an entire sidebar with ads, if lost advertising is a concern...
And to whoever moderated his post a troll, get a life. He's trying to improve the experience for us readers and we should encourage dialog...
Re:Nice, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Gamers, certainly, most likely have Windows systems. Workstation applications are likely a good chunk of Windows, with a slice of Mac, and some Linux.
Bulk crunching, though, which is where CUDA might make NVIDIA some real money, is overwhelmingly Linux based. Linux is, by a substantial margin, the obvious choice for big commodity clusters.
Re:Tom's Hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's why you're proven to be a money-hatted site.
Advertising bandwidth versus actual article content bandwidth. Your advertising uses up about 2500% more bandwidth than the actual article content.
You care more about advertising than you do about content. That's why you split everything up into so many pages that I could have done in less than two, single-spaced, 20 point font.
Re:Tom's Hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll pass this feedback along to the design guys, but do you *really* want to scroll through 4,000 words and 50-some charts, rather than looking at just the pages you're interested in reading?
Yes, I do. I can scroll just fine thank you and I can also use the browser's built in word search to find specific words anywhere in the current page, but I can't do that and stay sane at the same time if I have to click 15 times and search 15 times for each word I might want find.
Surely the length would be a bigger problem if there wasn't an index, right?
Put the index in a sidebar or at the top of the single page. HTML has had document internal anchor points since pretty much day 1.
What About Multiple GPU Cards in 1 Host? (Score:3, Insightful)
Those benchmarks show that even older ($120-140) nVidia GPU cards can really speed up some processing tasks, especially transcoding video. But what I think is even more exciting than just the acceleration from offloading CPU to GPU is using multiple GPU cards in a single host PC. Stuff a $1000 PC with $1120 in GPUs (like 8 $140 nVidia cards), and that's 1024 parallel cores, anywhere from 16x to 56x the performance at only just over double the price. PCI-e should make the data parallel fast enough to feed the cards. I bet that 8 $1000 cards stuffed into a $1000 PC would be something like 200x to 4000x for only 9x the price.
So what I want to see is benchmarks for whole render farms. I want to see HD video transcoded into H.264 and other formats simultaneously on the fly, in realtime, with true fast-forward, in multiple independent streams from the same master source. This stuff is possible now on a reasonable budget.
Re:Tom's Hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
What's with only allowing registered users access to the print version? I pretty much gave up on being able to read the article after seeing that.
Re:Nice, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is not a bug, it's a feature. It prevents your app from taking the OS down with it (or at least, part of it). It is generally quite easy to ensure your kernels are small enough to last less than 5s. Since a kernel launch takes a few milliseconds, it is both easy and efficient to subdivide a big computation into several consecutive kernel calls.