With a new graphics driver and a series of free, “Power Pack” downloads, Nvidia has finally switched on the GPU computing capabilities of its 8000, 9000, and 200 series GeForce cards. Among the things to try are three games (one full, one demo, one Unreal Tournament 3 map), a demo of a fashion-oriented social-networking program called Nurien, a video-encoding application, and a GPU-accelerated Folding@Home client.

Nvidia’s new graphics driver and its

CUDA-based potential Pack downloads.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

All of these programs rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software to target your GeForce card, and as such, they require special coding on the part of their programmers. As it’s Nvidia-specific cipher, these programs won’t work whether you have an integrated Intel graphics chip or an ATI graphics card (at least, technically).

According to Jon Peddie Research, […]

Orginal post by Rich Brown