Nvidia first to deliver public OpenCL GPU drivers
In the ever ongoing tussle between Nvidia and AMD/ATI to deliver better gaming hardware, software plays a big part too. The right driver software can increase or decrease performance and help outrun the competition. Then delivering new features through software can have a greatly sway the consumer’s decision while buying a new video card. OpenCL is the set to be the hottest kid in town by allowing heterogeneous computing (CPU+GPU) allowing to tap the massive parallel computing power hidden in current and future video cards.
The Santa Clara company has earned the distinction of being the first to deliver OpenCL v1.0-compliant drivers for both Windows and Linux. Also released is the OpenCL Visual Profiler, a tool which offers developers with insight into performance bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization. The OCL VP has support for all CUDA-ready GPUs and features:
– Profiling of actual hardware signals, kernel efficiency, and instruction issue rate
– Timing of memory copies between system memory and GPU dedicated memory
– Customizable graphs to help developers focus in on problem areas
– Basic auto-analysis to reveal warp serialization problems
– Easy import/export to CSV for custom analysis
The drivers can be grabbed from http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opencl-download.html
