NVIDIA GeForce 9300 and 9400 Motherboard GPUs

Name: NVIDIA GeForce 9300 and 9400 Motherboard GPUs - Page 3
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, October 15, 2008, 09:00 AM EDT

Much of NVIDIA's recent marketing has centered around the notion that GPUs and mGPUs aren't just for gaming any longer, which you'd expect considering they've got GPU architectures in their arsenal capable of much more than graphics. Of course, we've known this to be true for quite some time, but there definitely seems to be more happening in the GPGPU arena as of late. Over the past few weeks and months, NVIDIA has shown off a number of applications that all benefited from the power of a GPU, and none of them are games.

The application you see pictured above is a beta, pre-release version of Elemental Technologies’ BadaBOOM video encoder. BadaBOOM takes advantage of ETI’s GPU-powered RapiHD Video Platform to offload some video encoding duties from the CPU, onto the GPU, to accelerate the process of converting standard-definition video from any format to H.264 for portable media devices, like an iPod, Zune, or iPhone.

NVIDIA, along with representatives from Stanford University, have also developed a brand new version of the Folding @ Home client which uses the GPU for its calculation. While using the GPU, the F @ H client shows massive speed increase compared to existing CPU architectures. A typical CPU can do about 4ns / day, a PS3 about 100, a Radeon HD 3870 approximately 170, and GeForce GTX 280 about 500ns / day.

Which of course brings us to PhysX. If you remember, NVIDIA acquired AGEIA not too long ago and incorporated PhysX support into all CUDA capable (GeForce 8, 9, and GTX 200 series) GPUs and mGPUs. Since NVIDIA took over AGEIA, there has been much more buzz surrounding PhysX, and word is that many more developers have jumped, or will jump, on board. Having NVIDIA's marketing muscle behind the PhysX technology has resulted in a number of new developers signing on to use the technology.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, GPU, Motherboard, 9300, force, board, id, AR, and, GPUs

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com