Digital Home Thoughts: NVIDIA CUDA Shows Practical Use

"When NVIDIA went to a driver model that allowed consumers to update their notebook graphics drivers direct from NVIDIA, we enabled millions of notebook users to enjoy the benefits of our CUDA parallel computing architecture. One application that was released today that is a great example of how CUDA makes life better is vReveal from MotionDSP."

Up until now, most of what I had seen CUDA used for was enabling PhysX effects in gaming. This made sense since most computers with powerful (read: non-integrated) GPUs would be used for gaming at some point. This is the first use I've seen that makes CUDA more useful for your typical consumer. vReveal magically improves the quality, clarity and brightness of your videos. Instead of using traditional filters you would find in Photoshop or GIMP to do this, it takes the data from several frames to smooth and improve the current frame. If you watch the videos on the notebooks.com site, the effects can be quite dramatic. Getting back to CUDA, vReveal can technically run on any computer, but those with NVIDIA GPUs can see a several fold increase in speed because of CUDA. Unfortunately for most people who already have a laptop or desktop, I'm willing to bet its got an Intel integrated GPU. If you do a lot of video processing, this may just be the reason you need to get a new computer! That's a good reason, isn't it?