NVIDIA nTeresting Newsletter - 4 February 2013

In This Issue:

· Project SHIELD is changing everything. NVIDIA gives you the inside scoop at how it made it to Vegas for its coming out party.

· Crysis 3 hits with a BETA. NVIDIA hits with a new driver. GeForce owners are grinning while others are left disappointed. Reviewers say it's a pattern: buyer beware.

· GPUs are known for kickass performance, but a new GPU-based supercomputer is breaking records for power efficiency, and using water-cooling to get there.

· HPCWire says you should keep your eye on NVIDIA's Sumit Gupta. He is a driving force for GPU computing.

· GTC will feature a diverse mix of people, from Academy Award winners to rocket scientists, all brought together by their use of the GPU.

Project SHIELD: Behind the Music

NVIDIA opened the curtain on Project Shield with a behind the scenes look at that happened leading up to the big unveil at CES 2012.

There was plenty of work left to do - the frenzied sprint to prepare units for CES had only just begun. But despite some cussing, the first few units were coming together. It was shortly after Gilroy had completed his late night KFC run that Bell flipped up the device's screen and start to fiddle with it. He grinned.

"Anyone else want to play some games?" he asked.

Built by gamers, for gamers, Project SHIELD was a concept we've been thinking about internally for the better part of a decade with the first prototype coming together early last year. The blog post delves into a number of topics including the importance of streaming PC games and the furious sprint to launch at CES, included below for your reference.

Project Shield is gaming portable for open platforms designed for those who yearn to play when, where and how they want. Created with the philosophy that gaming should be open and flexible, it plays both Android and PC titles. As a pure Android device, it gives access to any game on Google Play. And as a wireless receiver and controller, it can stream games from a PC powered by GeForce GTX GPUs, accessing titles on its STEAM game library from anywhere in the house.

"Besides being a complete stand-alone Android gaming system, the chunky controller can also stream games that have already been loaded on a Windows PC, providing users are sharing the same Wi-Fi router and the computer is equipped with a recent NVIDIA graphics processor (specifically a Kepler-based GeForce GTX 650 or better). Even hard-core gamers take breaks, right? So now you can carry your game of Assassins Creed around the house with you. Other features include a set of standard game controls and 5- to 10-hour rechargeable batteries."

NVIDIA's developer relations machine is already actively working with developers on many platforms and Android is no exception. Take Arma Tactics for example, which will have a SHIELD version that will feature special particle and post-processing effects, as well as hardware support for the device's controller.

"Bohemia revealed today that it is working on a spin-off title in its popular first-person shooter series called Arma Tactics, with the game due for release in the second quarter of this year. Notably, Arma Tactics is currently exclusive to the Project Shield handheld, and the NVIDIA Tegra 4 platform. The game is a turn-based strategy title in the same vein as X-Com and Jagged Alliance, with randomized missions and objectives, and story-driven gameplay. Bohemia says that it will make use of both the Shield's touchscreen and gamepad controls."

NVIDIA has a history of pushing the envelope to make games better for gamers.

"As we have seen on PC, competitive pressure will raise the level of graphics complexity, and when that happens, NVIDIA can take the fight to a turf on which it has been fighting for almost two decades, and where it has defeated 50 other graphics companies or so, although a few like AMD and PowerVR remain very strong. If Android becomes a great gaming platform, NVIDIA would have a chance to add more value, faster than anyone else - that's how I imagine NVIDIA sees it."

Project SHIELD is a gaming portable for open platforms. Created with the philosophy that gaming should be open and flexible, SHIELD flawlessly plays both Android and PC titles.

Crysis 3 is Out! Guess Who Wins.

The BETA for the latest offering in the celebrated Crysis series is out. And like clockwork, NVIDIA is ready with a new driver to make it better.

"The biggest credit that I have to give NVIDIA is releasing drivers with popular named games. Time in and time out NVIDIA has a driver ready anytime something big is happening, and the profiles generally support every aspect of the game. When a GeForce driver is released for a new game, we can immediately expect to have SLI performance for multi-display gaming. AMD dropped the ball after releasing its HD 7000 series video cards back at the end of 2011. It took them a few months before they ever added any CrossFire support came out so customers could use multiple video cards without worrying about stability issues. We even let AMD know what it was doing wrong in our AMD CrossFireX Drivers - Opportunity Lost article. NVIDIA showed none of this negligence towards its customers this year, making them hands down the better company as far as delivering driver software this year."

When Crysis 3 hit, NVIDIA was ready. We updated GeForce R313 beta drivers to GeForce 313.96. We delivered lots more gaming goodness and improved performance, such as:

o Up to 65% in Crysis 3 with SLI
o Up to 28% in Assassin's Creed III
o Up to 15% faster in Civilization V
o Up to 14% in Call of Duty: Black Ops II
o Up to 12% in in other top games like Far Cry 3, Dirt 3, and Battlefield 3.

When Crysis 3 hit, reviewers were ready. They toss it on the test bench to see who comes out on top.

"The most optimized Crysis 3 graphics card is NVIDIA."

Hardcore gamers know that your GPU is only as good as its drivers. Don't sleep on driver support when looking for your next GPU.

"It seemed more often than not NVIDIA got its driver optimizations for games right the first time. This is something that buyers should take into consideration for any graphics card series. It is important to look back at the history, and support for new games as they are released."

NVIDIA GPUs: Record breaking Efficiency

It is common knowledge that NVIDIA is all about the GPU, and that the GPU is all about gaming. NVIDIA began applying gaming goodness to other computing areas with startling results.

"In a breakthrough that harnesses video-game technology for solving science's most complex mysteries, the U.S. government's new Titan machine was named the world's fastest supercomputer. Deployed just two weeks ago, Titan is the fastest, most powerful, and most energy-efficient of a new generation of supercomputers that breach the bounds of "central processing unit" computing."

Anyone that has spent time at GeForce LAN or one of the many other LAN events we attend is familiar with water-cooling on gaming PCs. Water cooling for home PCs has gained recognition amongst enthusiasts who use it to overclock their PCs to the max. Water cooling can be used to cool many computer components, but especially the CPU, GPUs, Northbridges, Southbridges, memory, voltage regulator modules (VRMs), and even power supplies. Well why not apply that to a supercomputer?

"By using water cooling, Eurotech and Cineca have been able to capture the waste heat off of Eurora in a far more dense and more useful manner than air would allow, in turn allowing them to put that waste heat to productive use. By using that heat to not only heat their buildings but also to drive absorption chillers, they've been able to reduce the amount of heat that ultimately needs to be removed from the system, and consequently the amount of energy that is spent on cooling."

The results, again, are startling.

"Today NVIDIA announced that the hybrid Eurora supercomputer at Cineca in Italy has set a new record for data center energy efficiency using Kepler GPUs. Built by Eurotech, the hot water-cooled Eurora system reached 3,150 megaflops per watt of sustained performance, which is 26 percent better than the top system on the most recent Green500 list."

Water cooling, FTW! Read more on the blog.

Check Out the Big Brain on Sumit!

HPCwire named NVIDIA's Sumit Gupta to its 12 People to Watch for 2013 list.

"Gupta has been at the eye of storm of GPU computing from the beginning, when NVIDIA erupted onto the high performance computing scene in 2007. Since then, he's had the opportunity to work with scientific and computing visionaries in universities and throughout the technology industry to developing and applying advanced GPU accelerator solutions to solve some of the world's most complex computational problems. He is intensely focused on advancing the global awareness and use of GPU accelerated computing, which offers the potential to fundamentally accelerate the pace of innovation and discovery in science and industry."

Hear more in the People to Watch podcast.

GTC Brings Together Creative Types and Geeks

NVIDIA will be hosting the fourth annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2013) in San Jose, Calif., between March 18 - 21 - and this year, we're expanding the scope of GTC to cover virtually all GPU-enabled innovation and breakthroughs across academia, science, government, and industry.

You expect to see the scientists there, but the entertainment world is coming to a GPU tech conference in a big way.

"With a special emphasis on media and entertainment for 2013, the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) will bring together leading feature film and TV producers, visual effects artists, post-production professionals, broadcasters, and software developers from around the world."

We have 44 scheduled talks and some really heavyweight speakers from, for example, vizrt, ESPN, Pixar, WETA, and more. At GTC you will find an eclectic group of smart people, all with GPU usage in common. Academy Award winners, animation gurus, and special effects artists will be milling about with medical imaging pros and supercomputer builders. Find out more details on GTC here.