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BedstorfromAP
Reg'd: Thu
Posts: 5099
Loc: 32 Bus Stops West of Wigan UK
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If your computer has an up to date Nvidia Graphics card With a 256 MB RAM or above Be aware it has a Party trick which Basically Dynamically Boosts the Processing speed on certain applications Viz: Quote:
complex compute-intensive problems.
Intrepreted as Programs like the BOINC/Seti Applications
My take on it is the Processing times are Faster by circa 3 hours (on Seti) 
The Feature is NOT listed on many applications .In fact, it is already in place .(and running silently)
The driver is called CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) and its bundled with the Nvidia display Driver Worth updating off the Nvidia site. The Latest Driver has a Beta version listed .I chose the Slightly older (November 08) version with the Final Version 2.0 CUDA driver (NVIDIADisplayWin2k(178_28)Int) Download of 118MB ! (this is for the XP Version)
www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html
DO NOTE : Don't download anything else (these are Toolkits and SDK Development versions) All high brow stuff)
Here are the cards with this Feature :www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn_products.html
Quote:
GeForce 8, 9, 200-series GPUs with a minimum of 256MB of local graphics memory
There are also Nvidia Tesla Cards have the best performance numbers ( they are Domestic Server cards)
If you are curious read the specs and the Price and go open mouthed .then move to the Quadro Version specs (Need a Kings ransom and a beefy transformer to keep this plot running,) OH and a forklift to pick your mouth off the floor :O (The technology has trickled down from these cards which are CUDA Chipped naturally)
What happens is the Load is taken off the CPU Processor and put onto the Graphics (GPU) card processor So in combination the application is dealt with a lot faster
NOTE: I have not enabled the SLI link to bring my 2nd graphic card into use (So I do not know if the "Processing speed" will increase?)
If it does cut the times again . Then in theory a Top of the Range Multi card setup (with a quad core chip) will slice through work at silly speeds (without overclocking)
Question, Is this Feature highlighted on System information programs such as SIW?
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History so far.. 10 years surfing & 29 Years Computing (First ZX81 1k)
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