nVidia

State of Graphics: DirectX 12 & Vulkan

by

In Second Life we run on OpenGL. Most Windows games run on DirectX. Microsoft has announced DirectX 12. It will essentially make NVIDIA 500 series and older cards obsolete. To use DX12 you’ll need a 600 or newer series card. This video explains what is happening. OpenGL is not left out. It looks like ATI/AMD … Read more

NVIDIA 15 Times Faster?

by

I came across a link to this article in the SL Forum: NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains. That means if you are getting 20 FPS you should jump to 300 FPS.

The long version is the video and it is way techy:

[youtube -bCeNzgiJ8I]

So, what are they saying? Loosely… They are creating sides of the render process that are not locked together. This means the CPU and GPU are mostly never waiting on each other. As it is now, single note pads (large blocks of memory} are being cleared, being drawn to by a single process to build up images, then used, and erased with the process starting over. Multiple processes need multiple note pads. The next process can’t use the resources until the preceding processes release the resources/note pads. The memory that makes up the note pads has to be moved around.

Read more

nVidia Forum Back

by

If you are an nVidia owner and have used the nVidia forum, you know they closed it to upgrade it. It like many forums was being overrun by spammers. The forum has been down for weeks. Now it is open, as of November 1 or 12, depending on who you read.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II – From Tom’s Hardware Review

The forum has been rearranged. CUDA developers now have their own forum. If you don’t know, CUDA is more for math geeks than gamer geeks. So, apparently they haven’t played well together.

Read more

NVIDIA Driver Update 306.23

by

A new video driver is out from nVidia. The previous good one or at least one that worked for me was 301.42. Development for this new one has taken longer than usual for whatever reasons. But it is here now.

My nVidia 306.23 install is working with Second Life. No pink textures, which some nVidia users were starting to see. Pink textures are caused by the video card and the viewer getting out of sync on which textures are which. When the viewer can’t get a texture to display, it shows the texture as pink. So, while the problem is in the video card and driver the pink is the viewer’s error signal.

I did have a problem with the PhysX failing to install. I am researching that now. There are a number of known problems with this driver. See the nVidia 306.23 Release Notes (PDF file) for a list.

Read more