nTersect

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 11:24 AM PDT

Sometimes I get so busy I have a hard time remembering things that have happened just a few years ago. But there's one area of my life where I remember almost everything that's happened in the last 30 years. What is it? Simple. It's my hobby, something I enjoy tremendously, something I live for. It's gaming.

Maybe I sound like some crazy gamer who spends hours alone in his room playing games. It's not true. But gaming has been a huge part of my life, and it's the reason I am where I am today.

I was born in the Czech Republic in 1974. At that time, the country was deeply Communist. Growing up, I didn't have much chance to encounter real technology or even games, because those things were available to only a very few.

In the outside world, the arcade revolution was happening at that time, followed by the first home entertainment systems. But I didn't know anything about it. Since most of the Czech population was forbidden to travel to the West, we didn't know about legendary systems like the Atari VCS, ColecoVision, Intellivision or Vectrex.

Despite these restrictions, there were a few times a year that kids got the chance to play arcade systems at shows that were held throughout the city. Somehow, these guys imported old arcade systems from the West into our country (to this day, I still don't know how they did it without getting into trouble with the authorities.)

My first encounter with gaming was fatal :) I don't remember how much money I spent playing Space Invaders, Galaga, Pacman, Centipede and many others. I surprised my parents by wanting to do the shopping for them. They didn't know I was spending the change on arcade games. Even then, I knew that gaming was something I wanted to be a part of my life.

In 1982 one of my school friends showed me a brand-new home computer: the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. His father worked as a programmer in one of the government computer centers, and during a work trip to the UK he'd been able to bring back this little miracle. I was amazed. Here was everything the big arcade games had, but in a home system and for free.

I spent two years arguing with my parents and making impossible promises just so they'd buy me a computer. Back then, computers were very expensive and difficult to get. You had to find someone traveling to Western Europe to buy one and bring it back for you. I got my first computer for my tenth birthday, and I very much believe that it changed the course of my life.

During the years that followed, I had many computers and gaming systems. I played most of the legendary games, starting with Pacman and moving on to Manic Miner, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Dungeon Master, GoldenEye, Metal Gear Solid, Quake, Doom, Counter-Strike, Dune, Warcraft, Diablo, Mafia, World of Warcraft, Mass Effect, Batman Arkham Asylum, Uncharted and many others. My passion for gaming turned into a passion for the gaming industry and an interest in the history of gaming itself. I collected as many gaming systems as possible on eBay (I had almost 100 gaming systems and arcade cabinets in my collection at one point) and I had the chance to meet many great game developers and professionals during that time.

I'm sure you can find stories like mine with other gamers around the world. Today they may be professionals in the gaming or hardware business, but they got started with computers like the Commodore 64, Atari XE, Commodore Amiga and many others. Younger people probably have no idea what I'm talking about, because their memories start with the first PlayStation. But it's because of early systems like these that gaming is what it is today.

It would be cool to have a photo gallery of my gaming room from early 80s until today because everything still looks pretty much the same. The biggest difference is that the small monochromatic monitor and joystick with one button have been replaced with a 30-inch LCD with 3D Surround and a keyboard and mouse. Why is everything almost the same? Because the passion for games doesn't change. And it doesn't matter if you are playing Pacman and eating small pac-dots or shooting mutants in Metro 2033.

As George Bernard Shaw said: We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

I'm Igor Stanek and I'm a real gamer.

New Quadro Solutions Boost Tool and Applications Engine Performance

Posted: 29 Jul 2010 01:13 PM PDT

We're wrapping up our coverage from SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles, where we've had an incredible time showing off some amazing demos of our new Quadro professional graphics solutions. But our wrap-up wouldn't be complete without a look at some new capabilities that our Fermi-based Quadro line brings to the tools and application engines for developers.

Redesigning the GPU with the Fermi architecture has brought incredible performance increases to a wide range of applications, right out of the box. With our NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine, we're seeing up to 4x performance boosts, depending on the ray tracing technique used to create photorealistic images. So designers and engineers benefit, as well as those who want ray tracing without rendering – for uses such as collision detection and acoustical analysis.

By the way, NVIDIA had a technical paper titled "OptiX: A General Purpose Ray Tracing Engine" which was accepted this year at SIGGRAPH. It's a big honor, so we wanted to give kudos to the OptiX team.

The new Quadro also lets you take advantage of our new GPU Tessellation Engine, as well as a new Bezier class for rendering super smooth models at all times. Here, the news is all about dynamic tessellation, which changes an object's geometry on the fly while staying perfectly smooth. When an object is in the background of a scene, it can usually be shown without a lot of detail (e.g., triangles) and with the benefit of dynamic tessellation, the number of triangles that make up that object can grow as it increases in size and closeness to the virtual camera. The new Quadro series will enable massive amounts of geometry to be generated on the fly and in real-time. Developers can quickly take advantage of dynamic tessellation with our Cg shading language.

If you're at the show today, stop by the NVIDIA booth (#717). You'll be able to see our demos that show what's possible when you combine the new Quadro professional graphics, hardware acceleration and our interactive ray tracing and rendering tools, such as iray from mental images. One of these demos is of an enormous dataset – an aircraft carrier with a full complement of planes rendered in real time – that you've got to see to believe.

Special thanks to our sponsors Dell, HP and Barco who are also showing some great workstation and display wall solutions. It's computational visualization at its finest. Come check it out.

Made for Life

Friday, 30 July 2010

nTersect

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