NVIDIA's New CUDA 2.0 Development Kit Promises Better Graphics

Also on Friday, NVIDIA released CUDA 2.0, a development tool for applications that use many of NVIDIA's graphics processors (GPU). Fortunately, that includes the GeForce 8800GT, an upgrade graphics card in my Mac Pro. It also includes the GeForce 8600M GPU used in Apple's MacBook Pro notebooks. In addition, CUDA 2.0 works with Mac OS X as well as Windows XP and Vista and Linux.

The production release of CUDA 2.0, the latest version of NVIDIA's award-winning C language programming environment for GPUs, enables software developers to tap into the massively parallel architecture of the GPU for the acceleration of complex computational problems. This latest production release of the CUDA software suite includes support for Mac OS X as well as 3D textures and hardware interpolation to increase the efficiency of applications such as medical volume reconstruction and oil and gas seismic computing.

Also included in CUDA 2.0 is an Adobe Photoshop plug-in example for Mac versions of the software. The example allows developers to design plug-ins that move the most compute-intensive functions of Adobe Photoshop to the GPU, such as filtering and image manipulation, delivering dramatic performance improvements. The plug-in is available as source code so developers can easily develop advanced filters and imaging techniques that are available directly within Adobe Photoshop.

CUDA 2.0 also features additional source code examples and new compiler optimizations and is available today as a free download from this NVIDIA Web page. [Bill Fox]