nTersect

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 10:02 AM PDT

I hate to throw stuff out, especially computer parts. Some things I keep for "sentimental" reasons, like my old graphics cards (that's what I tell my wife and I'm sticking to it). In fact, I believe I still have most every graphics card I ever bought or got for "evaluation." I also have a number of old motherboards, CPUs, disk drives, even a 5.25in floppy drive. This does not make my wife happy, but I try to keep it out of sight.

Not all the old components are in my hands, however, I often have often had to pass along older graphics cards and motherboards to my kids when building their PCs. Rest assured I reclaim them later, when they get the next upgrade. Oh, I should explain – I have never bought a desktop PC, I have always built them; and then rebuilt them. So I have gone through a lot of motherboards, adapters, CPUs, and DRAM...the list goes on.

The first serious 3D graphics card I owned was a Canopus Pure3D card with a 3DFx Voodoo (1) 3D accelerator I purchased back in 1997 (before NVIDIA shipped the TNT family). The original Voodoo cards only did the 3D game - you still needed a 2D (VGA) card for regular graphics and text. I delayed getting my 3Dfx card until the Canopus card shipped because it had 6MB of RAM instead of the regular 4MB and it had S-Video output that could connect to a TV (something I did maybe once or twice).

Here's a Tom's Hardware article when there was a real Tom (Pabst) writing for it. This card was the best card for playing Quake at the time using a stripped-down and proprietary version of OpenGL called GLide. While Doom was the first game that really got me into first person shooter (FPS) PC games, it was Quake that got me involved in LAN parties, which then led to online gaming. Unfortunately, I came a bit late to FPS games, so in the early days of the LAN parties, I got killed pretty fast. Embracing my n00b predisposition of becoming "dead meat" I and made "Meatman" my game handle. If you can't beat 'em...

But it all started with the Voodoo card and Quake. Oh, and did I mention, I have a lot of my original game disks? Hmmm, are there still any Tribes servers around?

My name is Kevin and I'm a gamer and a geek.

Live Chat with Ian Buck – Ask Your Questions Now

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 01:16 PM PDT

Hey there, my name is Ian Buck and I'm the Software Director of GPU Computing here at NVIDIA. I helped start the CUDA team six years ago and have had the wonderful pleasure of watching it grow and change the world of high performance computing. Before my time here at NVIDIA, I was the development lead on Brook which was the forerunner to generalized computing on GPUs.

I wanted to introduce myself because I'll be the guest speaker on a live text-chat here on the blog Tuesday July 13, 11am PDT. I'll be dishing out my thoughts on GPU computing and answering your questions, like how did we come up with the name "CUDA". You can set an e-mail reminder for yourself in the widget below or you can bookmark this post which will be updated with the chat window on Tuesday.

This is actually the first Live Chat in a blog-series that we're hosting prior to the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in September . If you haven't heard about GTC, here's a little info, and here's a link to all GTC related blog posts. I'll be speaking at GTC this year about the GPUs evolution as a general computing processor, and last year I gave a talk called From Brook to CUDA.

The live chat is a cool opportunity prior to GTC for speakers like me to engage with you, maybe even get some ideas of what we should focus on. I'm always interested in hearing new and interesting applications for GPUs.

If you have any questions for me, but won't be able to attend the live chat, please drop them in the comments below. We'll pick a few, and of course give you credit.

Looking forward to chatting…

Made for Life

Tuesday 13 July 2010

nTersect

nTersect

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