On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 09:35:30AM +0100, Daniel James wrote: > > The fact that you most probably won't be using 3d graphics at the > > same time as making music doesn't mean that you might not want them > > for other multi-media purposes > > Sure. I'm guess I'm just lucky enough to own more than one machine. > But if you want lots of polygons drawn quickly, you can probably get > a complete Sony PS2 for the price of some of these graphics cards. > > Nvidia claims the hardware rendering on the Quadro FX 500 is > programmable in a C-like language: > It is called Cg and has been around for some time. It works on any Nvidia card with a programmable pipeline (i.e. GeForce3+)... http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=cg_main > How you get the tools for this language, it doesn't say. > Downloads (also sources) for Linux are available there. Also, this article, "The Future of 3D Graphics" was recently linked from Slashdot: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1091392,00.asp Quote: "Any sort of computation of a collection of data where elements interact with other elements with high locality is extremely efficient on a GPU. In fact, the GPU can be from 10 to 100 times faster than a Pentium 4 in such situations, says Kirk. Scientific computations such as linear algebra, Fast Fourier Transforms, and partial differential equations can also benefit greatly from GPUs. One research group is looking to break the Linpack benchmark world record using a cluster of 256 PCs with GeForce FXs! Another scenario that surprised Kirk was when a development team recently tried to use a GeForce FX CPU to perform database key sorting. When coded to take advantage of the parallelism and pipelining in the GPU, parallel key sorts and searches can occur much faster than using general CPUs, on the order of 4-5x faster than the Pentium 4, according to Kirk." cheers, Christian Henz
