ArsGeek

Nvidia today decided it was high time we all got some updates for our G8x or higher video cards.  They’ve enabled through a new driver PhysX and CUDA support!  What does this mean for you? Well first it means you should jump on over to this site and download not only the new driver, but a bunch of cool stuff for you to use with PhysX and CUDA.

Time was, you’d have to buy your own PhysX chip as seperate hardware and install it so that the few applications that could use it would work.  now Nvidia has given it to us (perhaps as a distraction?).  What is PhysX?  Essentially it’s a real time physics engine wich can make game play look and feel a lot more realistic.  CUDA?  Well Wikipedia sums it up rather well with “set of development tools that allow programmers to use the C programming language to code algorithms for execution on the graphics processing unit (GPU).”

What can you get from Nvidia for free?  This:

GeForce Graphics Driver - v177.83
Unreal Tournament 3 - PhysX Mod
badaboom Video Transcoding: 30-day Trial Beta
Warmonger – Full Game
Folding@home - Join The Fight Against Cancer
Sneak Peak: Nurien Demo
Sneak Peak: Metal Knight Zero Demo
The Great Kulu: Technology Demo
Fluids: Technology Demo

They’ve even launched a new series of workstations, the Quadro Plex (hovering in the $10k range) for high end graphics stuff.  It’s got 480 Processing Cores, NVIDIA CUDA Programmability and 8 GB of Graphics Memory!  Oh the things I could do, the Folding I co Add that to my holiday wish list.

EDIT: I installed the latest on my rig at home (with an 8800 GTX) and ran all last night with no glitches.  The new PhysX demos are a lot of fun to watch.  The driver also ran smoothly in other games, from Hellgate London to Call of Duty 4 for several hours of constant play. Now we just need some good PhysX enabled games to hit the shelves.

Here’s a complete list of supported cards:

GeForce 8800 GTS
GeForce 8800 GT
GeForce 8800 GS
GeForce 8600 GTS
GeForce 8600 GT
GeForce 8600 GS
GeForce 8500 GT
GeForce 8400 SE
GeForce 8400 GS
GeForce 8400
GeForce 8300 GS
GeForce 8300
GeForce 8200
GeForce 8100 / nForce 720a
GeForce 8100 / nForce 720a

Technorati Tags: nvidia, physx, cuda, graphics, high end, free games, neato, smash, bang, blammo