I always thought that this time will come sooner or later. The race for super photo-realistic gaming with dozens of FPS enabled some of us to have a real computational monsters inside our PC’s. But those big guns fired only when some app used DX10. Now NVidia gave the tools to go beyond just graphics programming. Of course some will still stay in virtual world to get the in-game physics into the higher level, but this is a great chance to go beyond.
Current GPUs are a decade ahead in means of paralleling that any CPU. Why? Graphics computing is the natural place where multiple threads are just a must. Now we are able to unleash this GFLOPs onto our desktop applications.
What is CUDA™ actually?
Lets cite the source here as they know it best:
NVIDIA CUDA™ technology is the world’s only C language environment that enables programmers and developers to write software to solve complex computational problems in a fraction of the time by tapping into the many-core parallel processing power of GPUs. With millions of CUDA-capable GPUs already deployed, thousands of software programmers are already using the free CUDA software tools to accelerate applications—from video and audio encoding to oil and gas exploration, product design, medical imaging, and scientific research.
If you got some C skills, GeForce 8xxx on board (I’m lacking both…) come on and give it a try – go ahead and visit NVIDIA’s CUDA™ zone to learn more. You can see there that some types of computations achieved even 100x or more speed improvement.