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CUDA 2 Beta now out at Nvidia.

I note that the Vista x64 drivers are up too... gonna try F@H BETA with them later. Anyone know what the general gaming performance is like with these over non-CUDA-enabled drivers? Don't wanna be sacrificing gaming performance for saving ill people!
 
I know what the CUDA is but I still don't see why I need it.

I grab a new Nvidia GPU driver in weeks to come and possibly a new build of the NVIDIA PhysX, correct ?.

I should never need to go near the CUDA download section of Nvidia correct ?
 
mattyfez said:
LOL yeh, CUDA is the vehicle which enables the PhysX drivers to work.
It is essentialy a technology that enables applications written in C+ to run onboard a graphics card, so in therory it could be used for any computing task, Physics being just one example.

Saying you dont want CUDA but want PhysX is like saying "I want a car, but not one of those cruddy ones that has wheels on it" :D
Click to expand...

good way to explain it, thanks :)
 
helmutcheese said:
I know what the CUDA is but I still don't see why I need it.

I grab a new Nvidia GPU driver in weeks to come and possibly a new build of the NVIDIA PhysX, correct ?.

I should never need to go near the CUDA download section of Nvidia correct ?
Click to expand...

correct, LoadsaMoney seems to have confused everyone with this thread.
the only reason you will want to download this CUDA beta 2 development toolkit is if your programming applications to make use of CUDA.

for gaming only 2 things you need fron nvidia's site, the display driver which has cuda physics enabled. and the latest version of the agiea/nvidia physx drivers.

no one needs to touch this CUDA beta 2 development toolkit UNLESS your developing cuda apps or debugging cuda based apps.

also for those that dont know nvidia also has a MATLAB cuda plugin up for grabs, since i use matlab i decided to test it out and there is a MASSIVE speed increase using a 8600gt. deffo worth grabbing it and the beta 177.35 driver (which is needed for cuda to work)
 
helmutcheese said:
I know what the CUDA is but I still don't see why I need it.

I grab a new Nvidia GPU driver in weeks to come and possibly a new build of the NVIDIA PhysX, correct ?.

I should never need to go near the CUDA download section of Nvidia correct ?
Click to expand...


Correct, but physx will only work on a CUDA enabled card, if you dont have a CUDA enabled card (GPU drivers with CUDA embedded) then physics will run on the CPU instead.

IF you have a suitable card (8series or higher) then the CUDA stuff is integrated in the normal driver updates and you wont notice its presence.
 
So, my guess is we are only actually going to lose out on performance if this is enabled, for slightly improved physics effects? Unlike if you had a dedicated card for it. Who has more than 1 GPU, not that many I would wager.
 
Look Im sorted now, I thought that this CUDA download was for peeps who want to code it (it is). :)

I do not code, I will NEVER EVER need to grab CUDA from Nvidia site (thanks to Cyber-Mav for confirming this confusion).

I will grab the new GPU Drivers which constain CUDA support when they arrived for the G80 (Look in my Sig), and a new NVIDIA PhysX build if needed. :)
 
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Snakedoctor said:
So, my guess is we are only actually going to lose out on performance if this is enabled, for slightly improved physics effects? Unlike if you had a dedicated card for it. Who has more than 1 GPU, not that many I would wager.
Click to expand...

the only game which currently is GPU physx enabled i believe is Unreal Tournament 3. and the tests done in that game enabling GPU physics using the beta drivers on a single 9800gtx show a pure performance increase.

there is NO performance decrease shown by the benchmarks that were done (do a search on the net for them cant remember the name of the site that tested it), there is simply a pure performance increase shown in UT3 when gpu assisted physics was enabled.

so if thats a sign of things to come, then looks like we get free performance increase and additional physics effects in games that support physics offloading onto the gpu. :)
 
thing is, say if he is running a game like UT3 with gpu physics disabled and gets 50fps, that than means with the gpu doing graphics only he is getting 50fps in the game.

now if he enabled gpu based physics and gets 57fps, then he has no lost anything in performance, he has actually gained 7fps by using gpu acceleration of physics.

now as to address how the gpu is doing the physics, its more than likley its done on the shaders, on the unused power, e.g a game that is texture bound will have lots of shader power free so coudl use that for physics processing. some games could be memory bandwidth limited and then the core works less since its waiting for data to come in or out of memory.
programs like FURMARK make the gpu get real hot showing that its working real hard, but playing some games even crysis will show that the gpu doesnt get as hot as furmark gets it. so it shows that there is some unused processing power by some games.

the only alternative i can think of is that nvidia's Quantum effects physics processing engine is a seperate unit on the gpu die and has been enabled by cuda just recently???
 
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Cyber-Mav said:
correct, LoadsaMoney seems to have confused everyone with this thread.
the only reason you will want to download this CUDA beta 2 development toolkit is if your programming applications to make use of CUDA.
Click to expand...

Yeah i should have said you only need to download the top one, as thats the 177.35 drivers that also have the latest CUDA driver in them (which is the CUDA 2 BETA), sorry for the confusion.:p
 
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helmutcheese said:
I think he means if the GPU has to do some PhysX, then he will loose some FPS as its not giving 100% to what it normally does.
Click to expand...

Indeed, those were my thoughts, there is no such thing as a free lunch. However I can see if the gpu is not being fully used, then yes you may see an improvement in visual effects. I didn't think UT3 really used the gpu much anyway, I got a rude number of FPS from the Demo.
 
LoadsaMoney said:
Yeah i should have said you only need to download the top one, as thats the 177.35 drivers that also have the latest CUDA driver in them (which is the CUDA 2 BETA), sorry for the confusion.:p
Click to expand...

confusion is good, your thread probably got the nvidia servers bombarded with download requests for the cuda development kit.

wait for next week nvidia annoucement saying that the cuda development platform has had over few million downloads now which means loads of peeps are now developing cuda based apps for nvidia cards. :p:D
 
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