Since Flash obviously isn’t easy on the CPU which of course reflects on netbooks’ battery life, Nvidia and Broadcom announced full hardware Flash acceleration by upgrading Adobe’s plugin resulting in smooth playback of HD flash video and lower CPU usage.

Unfortunately, these improvements will initially run only on Nvidia’s Tegra solutions or Atom netbooks with Broadcom’s Crystal HD video acceleration add-on. This means that it’ll take a while before we see this in action and even longer before it becomes a mainstream feature.

We’re likely to see some other Flash acceleration announcements as well, but until we see this feature in action we can’t say more.

More here.

During the last financial conference call, he told investors that a lot of people are doing video editing of their family videos that they want to send to their parents. Some cutting and editing, and especially rendering and transcoding of edited HD videos can take hours.

If you have a Cuda based application, or in the future a DirectX compute API enabled application in Windows 7, you should be able to do the video editing up to 5 or more times faster than with a CPU alone.

This is a big difference and Nvidia hopes that a lot of people will realize this. This is what makes Intel angry as the computer of today can really benefit a GPU for something other than just playing. Let’s just hope that Nvidia can pull this one off.

Nvidia’s product manager for Tesla producs, Sumit Gupta, recently said how new programming environments will utilize GPUs to accelerate software in OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 operating systems. Nvidia seems to be keen on proving the world that graphics cards are not solely for gaming, and thus the GPGPU acronym (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units).

OpenCL, a framework for writing programs which execute across platform containing CPUs, GPUs and potentially other processors, would enable users to more effectively utilize the potential that GPUs obviously pack, and even Apple on its website says that OpenCL will make it possible for developers to „efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit.“

In a nutshell, this means that graphics do so much more in the future, as having a CPU and a GPU in your system will mean there’re two workhorses to rely on, where both processing units will work together and divide the tasks among themselves. An example was cited as running Google’s Picasa on the CPU, but as soon as you choose an image and apply a filter, the GPU would take over.

Since interfaces in our OSs are obviously visual, it would make more sense for the GPU to handle it than the CPU Mr. Gupta also said. However, this doesn’t in any way mean that CPUs are not needed as he also added how „If you’re running an unpredictable task, the CPU is the jack of all trades“.

More here.

Of all the GPU horror stories we’ve witnessed over the years, they have been very few and far from the one spotted today. According to Skydive from the EVGA Forums, his brand new GTX 295 Quad-SLI setup is emitting just the right frequencies in the RF spectrum to interfere with his garage door openers.

He claims that the problem resolves itself when he shuts off his system and notes that the problem never occurred in the past with any other GPUs, all while using the same power supply unit. He also mentioned that the system, located in his office room, is on another circuit from the garage’s power, so the problem is certainly not likely to be an outside variable.

The observation at hand begs the question of just how valid the FCC’s safety and electromagnetic interference rating approvals might be. We know that EM fields can do strange things, but as Skydive states, “[the card] has to be pushing acceptable levels by the FCC if it can jam your garage door remotes.”

More here

LoiLoScope joins a growing group of applications

Japanese LoiLo Inc has joined the so far small group of companies making video applications that take advantage of Nvidia’s CUDA and GPGPU processing which helps speed up the whole process of rendering video, especially in the case of HD content.

We’d never heard of LoiLo Inc prior to this announcement, but we quickly downloaded the preview version called LoiLoScope Mars which allows you to check out most of the features of what Super LoiLoScope has to offer.

The user interface is very different from what we’ve come to expect from video editing software, but it only takes a couple of minutes to get used to. You simply drop all the files you want to use, alongside any of the fairly basic text or graphics effects on the desktop of the application. It’s easy to zoom in and out here and the CUDA acceleration really seems to help here. You can also add a few effects in real time to your videos at this stage. Once you’ve got all the content sorted out, you simply drag the files over to the time line editor and put everything in the order you want it to come out.

The free version doesn’t support HD output, but it will upload your content directly to YouTube for you. There are also presets for exporting your video to a wide range of devices such iPhone, iPod, phones, PSP, PS3, DVD etc. If you just want to save your work on your computer, then you can chose to do so in AVI, MOV, WMV and MPEG-4, although only MPEG-4 supports CUDA acceleration at the moment.

LoiLo claims that when you’re editing AVCHD content in 1080p the performance boost using CUDA is as much as 10 times compared to just using the CPU for rendering the video. However, Super LoiLoScope lacks many of the more advanced features most people would want for their video editing application these days and it’s really more of a “fun” application that something that could be used for serious video editing. However, at US$69 (€52/£47) it’s not terribly expensive and if you don’t have very high requirements with regards to what you can do with your home videos, but rather want a simple, easy to use application, then it might be for you.

You can find more details here, as well as download the free LoiLoScope Mars version here

Intel was not completely honest

Following Intel’s anti-MCP79 (Geforce 9400M) presentation, we decided to ask Nvidia for an opinion and we got one. Nvidia mostly agrees with our comments in the story but at the same time, it underlines that the comparison that Intel did was quite misleading.

They are comparing GM45 with dual channel memory vs. MCP79MVL with single channel memory, and GM45, as Intel’s top SKU, is compared to Nvidia’s entry level MCP79 SKU. Furthermore Nvidia believes that Intel chose entry notebooks that were not optimised for power management in its presentation. How convenient and truthful.

According to Nvidia’s test in 3Dmark 2006 1280×1024, GM45 scores around 1000 points, while the mainstream MCP79MVL scores approximately 1200 and MCP79MX scores over 2000.

In 3Dmark Vantage GM45 is at around 800 level, MCP79MVL scores 1700 while MCP79MX scores around 3200+.

In both PC marks Vantage and 2005 Nvidia clearly wins benchmarks and when it comes to battery life, Intel offers a bit better battery life but you can expect less than 10 percent better battery life where Intel can work approximately 3.20 minutes and Nvidia 3.10 minutes on the same CPU, monitor and configuration.

Now for the fun part, in the HQV HD video benchmark GM45 scores 20 points out of a possible 130, while MCP79MX scores 100 points and has CPU utilization of 30 percent. Intel takes more than 80 percent of CPU time to play this test on GM45.

If this is not enough for you the following games have issues or failing on GM45 even on low settings: World Of Warcraft, Age of Conan, WarhammerOnline, HL2 Titles (test EP2), Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Fallout 3, Call Of Duty, Crysis Warhead, Left 4 Dead, Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, Knight’s of the Old Republic 2 and probably many more.

You can check out the full presentation here.