NVIDIA GeForce 9300 and 9400 Motherboard GPUs

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.