Yeah CUDA is pretty crazy. What they don't tell you is you need a cooling unit (the CULA) which is the size of a small condo! :P

Heat factor. What drives your speed! Imagine your PC powering your refrigerator!???

Hi Grendel,

> I am also holding on to a hope that 3d soft companies will
> be able to harness the CUDA processors that nvidia introduced.

Some certainly will! But it is not really a great fit with every kind of software problem. Yes you've got 240 processing units in there, but each one of them is not as powerful as a regular main CPU...

It tends to be something that works well for speeding up things where you have a million pretty simple calculations that you want to get done. Rendering can often fit into this category well, and some things like particle or voxel processing is a good fit too.

But if the problem at hand does not easily split up into a million simple sub-tasks then it doesn't really fit into that area.

- Michael

The rendering is what I am hoping will fit.

Hi Grendel, have you tried nVidia Gelato yet? I think it is the main existing renderer that has been tuned to take advantage of this kind of stuff so far.

- Michael

I think Gelato is dead or going to be. Nvidia bought MentalImages (Mentalray) so I think all their focus going on that...

Michael- not yet, never seemed to get around to messing with it but I've seen good things from others who have.