HardMac has unearthed some information regarding a possible iMac and Mac Mini update this Tuesday.
Tag Archive for 'CUDA'
Whenever I call Chris Bentley, Mac 3D Manager from AMD, it’s always 10AM and the questions are heavy: Tell me secrets! Explain quantum mechanics! It’s either one or the other. And put it this way, I don’t know any secrets or understand quantum mechanics. Yet. But what I do know is that AMD are committed developers and they’ve got a great team working to make drivers for OS X better and faster. Score!
My latest my latest batch of questions for Chris are below, so take your seats and read all about drivers and cards for OS X, the challenges, the heart ache, and the history of 3D games on the platform.
I will pilfer all of AMD’s secrets from Chris. One day. Not sure about understanding quantum mechanics though…
NVIDIA invited me to their press event in London for their new mobile GPU - the 9400M. Unfortunately as I live in the wilds of England and have only small sums of hard cash to hand, I had to leave early and travel on the cheapest form of transport. In the 21st century it’s not robot cars or teleportation, it’s flying. Yes, the train was more expensive. Daft, eh?
I left my house at 5:10 in the morning. That’s too early. It was dark and a warm breeze blew autumnal leaves down the street. I shuddered at the early hour and the thought of the long day of traveling and waiting ahead of me. The taxi driver was cheery and chatted all the way to the airport. After a twenty minute conversation about computers, jobs in the North East and the decline of our home town, we arrived at Newcastle Airport. Strip lightning, horribly bright for 5:30AM, make me blink and probably look dead. If I was an airport worker, I’d bring a shotgun to work. Just in case the hordes of sandal wearing flyers and binge drink horrors turned into the undead. But then again, this is why I don’t work at the airport. Airports don’t like their staff carrying illegal firearms around. Goodness knows why. The zombie apocalypse is coming. The buggers at check in made me take my shoes off too, just in case I’d hidden all sorts of fun things in there. Luckily I’d flushed the huge quantities of cocaine stuffed in my moccasins in a fit of panic prior to check in. Onward!
Since we have none of these games for Mac OS X, well, meh. But Unreal 3 is coming our way soon. We need PhysX! We need it!
NVIDIA has begun rolling out drivers to activate the sleeping PhysX beast in all GeForce 8 series or higher graphics cards.
The first of many free GeForce Experience Packs includes mod support to unlock PhysX in Unreal Tournament 3, as well as offers shooter Warmonger, some tech demos, and sneak peaks at upcoming games are also included.
The new drivers unlock PhysX acceleration for GeForce 8, 9, and GTX 200 Series graphics cards, apparently, and also add support for Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2.
Using its clever-sounding CUDA development language, NVIDIA has been able to assign multiple processors on graphics cards to do different tasks - in this case render PhysX physics, but without the need for a specialised Physics Processing Unit card.
Bets on that we never see this technology on our Macs? Time to boot into Vista…
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