NVIDIA just announced a couple of motherboard GPUs (integrated graphics) named GeForce 9300 and GeForce 9400. Yes theyare the ones that Apple use in their new laptops, and what’s good for Apple’s laptopis also good to build an entry-level consumer PC -or the perfect home-theater PC. The idea is that you don’t have to pay $100 for a graphics card to get decent graphics anymore – it will already be onthe motherboard.
Put simply, the GeForce 9300 and 9400 can easily handle HD video playback (with PowerDVD), video and music encoding (via Badaboom) and entry-level gaming. NVIDIA says that this chip has five times the graphics performance of its competitor (the Intel G45) – I can believe it (I’ve seen it in action), and so does Apple. It has 16-cores, which is far from the 256-cores of the GTX280, but it is surprisingly enough to run games like Crysis, with reduced levels of detail, but at playable frame-rates.
The more interesting topic however is CUDA. With NVIDIA’s general-purpose compute language, applications can use the GPU to encode audio and video much faster than CPUs. If you plug a discrete graphics card, you can still use the motherboard GPU to handle game physics. That’s pretty cool too. What I would do with it is to build a (relatively) low-cost Media Center PC. With full hardware acceleration of Blu-Ray 1.1, H.264 and MPEG-2, the GeForce Series 9 can handle HD video without requiring a high-end CPU. That’s key to building a silent home-theater system.
There’s one catch: software integration. Right now, all this power can be tapped into by using specific software: PowerDVD, Badaboom. That’s not good enough and I hope that in the future, all that power can be tapped-in via native Windows libraries and applications like Windows Media Player (and therefore Windows Media Center). Now that Apple is using NVIDIA GPUs from top-to-bottom, I expect Max OS Snow Leopard to be the first system to integrate GPU computing. That will hopefully force Microsoft to follow… it’s about timewe start usingthese cores thatwe paid for.
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