Graphics cards are miraculous! (geekery)
by at 10:07 AM
From a terribly-written article (which I tried commenting on directly but their captcha was broken):
As PC applications become increasingly visual, many ordinary tasks will benefit from the graphics horsepower provided by this new GPU. These tasks range from editing photos to encoding/playing high-definition videos, even getting driving directions off the Internet to running a new operating system like Windows Vista.I'm pretty sure that the graphics card isn't involved at all in getting driving directions from the Internet. While it's conceivable that GPGPU could be used for performing the routing calculations (which, frankly, can be done even on 5-year-old graphics cards just fine - one of the very first GPGPU algorithms I ever saw was for minimal path finding), just because something is displayed visually doesn't mean it has anything to do with the performance provided by the highest-end graphics card on the market.
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That said, I've been meaning to try out the NVIDIA CUDA SDK. Even on the humble, meek 8800 GTX, there is a ridiculous amount of vector float crunching power.
Details are of course very vague at this point.
I like how the author can't even consistently spell "Havok" right, calls Havok the leading engine but then calls Ageia the leading engine, and then makes it sound as if systems which don't have hardware physics acceleration are "Havok systems" which would require parallel development to support (when Ageia is cross-platform and runs just fine in software too).