NVIDIA Releases Industry’s First Public OpenCL Conformant GPU Drivers and Performance Profiler
NVIDIA has released the first public OpenCL conformant GPU drivers as well as a powerful performance profiling tool and an OpenCL Best Practices Guide. The OpenCL Visual Profiler uses the extensive performance instrumentation in NVIDIA’s OpenCL drivers and hardware performance signals designed into NVIDIA GPUs to provide developers with insight into performance bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization. The OpenCL Best Practices Guide designed to help OpenCL developers programming for the CUDA architecture implement high performance parallel algorithms and understand best practices for GPU Computing. The OpenCL drivers, Visual Profiler, and Best Practices Guide are all available on the NVIDIA developers website.
MacResearch expands their OpenCL tutorial collection with episode 5
MacResearch initially launched its OpenCL Tutorials in August. Now they have five OpenCL tutorials in video format. The latest in their series is a video Questions and Answers session based on feedback from Episode 4 - Memory Access and Layout. If you are just getting started with OpenCL, these video tutorials from Mac Research make a great starting place.
Intel unveils OpenGL ES 2.0 capabable System-on-Chip for Internet Televisions
Intel Corp. unveiled the Atom CE4100 media chip at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2009. The CE4100 provides MPEG-4 support, 3D graphics, can capture uncompressed 1080p video, offers high-end audio, has a built in NAND controller and support DDR2 and DDR3 memory. The new chip provides full support for OpenGL ES 2.0 and Flash 10, providing a great environment for Flash based games, video and rich web content. A short video featurette is available at ZDNet.
ATI Stream SDK v2.0 Beta 3 released
AMD has released an update to their ATI Stream Software Developers Kit (SDK), putting v.20 at Beta 3. This version brings recognition of 64-bit atomic built-ins as well as fixes to compiler and code generation issues. The Khronos Group has a forum thread where you can express your thoughts on the ATI Stream SDK and OpenCL.
3DVIA introduces 3DVIA mobile app for iPhone
3DVIA introduces the 3DVIA Mobile App for iPhone users. 3DVIA mobile allows you to log into and manage your 3DVIA.com account, search and interact with the thousands of models posted on 3DVIA.com or create new art with 3DVIA Collage all from your iPhone for FREE.
COLLADA, Spore Creatures, WebGL and Mozilla–What a combo
Being able to export your Spore Creatures into .dae COLLADA format was a pretty cool trick. However, you could only preview your creatures as 2D images in your browser. Over the weekend, Mozilla was hard at work, fixing a few bugs in their implementation of WebGL. Over the weekend Vladimir Vukićevićwas was also busy putting together a very cool demo that will let you view your COLLADA exported Spore Creatures in 3D, right in your browser. If you have a browser with WebGL enabled, here is the demo page in action.
AMD supports OpenCL Bullet; Are Havok and PhysX in trouble?
According to Bright Side of News, AMD is dedicated to support open physics standards, with Pixelux and Bullet taking the prime spots. Bullet Physics Library is an open source physics library that is now getting translated into OpenCL, thanks to the effort of companies such as AMD.
Khronos Group expands OpenCL forums for coders
The Khronos Group has expanded the OpenCL section of their public forums, giving an area for users and coders to mingle together. The forums now contain categories for beginner and advanced coders, hardware and software issues for end users, OS specific question and help, and an area to discuss SDK's, toolkits and wrappers. The Khronos Group message boards are visited by the developers behind all the Khronos API's on a regular basis, and offer the best place to get help and give help. We look forward to seeing you on the Khronos forums soon.
WebGL appears in Mozilla trunk
Michael Smith posted on his twitter page this morning that WebGL has appeared in the Mozilla trunk. It was just three days ago that WebGL was first noticed in WebKit. From the homepage of Michael Smith, "I joined the W3C in 2007 as part [of] the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. I am involved with the work on The HTML Markup Language and on standards related to browsing technologies; in particular, the phenomenon known as HTML5, as well as other standards related to Web Applications."
Grand Central Dispatch and Open CL Bring Significant Performance Improvements
MovieGate developer Christophe Ducommun has been optimizing his application for the new Snow Leopard operating system with Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. His results show approximately 50% increase in video encoding speed when compared to the plain Leopard, while also reducing the CPU load during video decoding by passing some of the work to the graphics processing unit. These results highlight the potential performance gains OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch can bring as developers begin to take advantage of them.