The stars of the hit Discovery Channel show Mythbusters chatted it up with NVISION attendees today during a meet and greet session.  The serious dark beret wearing Jamie Hyneman and the happy-go-lucky Adam Savage autographed papers and posed for pictures with several dozen people who had waited up to an hour in line.  One fan was so excited and introduced all her children to the stars and exclaimed, “We all think you’re gods!”  To which Hyneman replied, “I’m sorry.”

Nvidia announced that it is counting on Via’s Nano and will make “a significant investment in optimizing [the company’s] software for the processor". During a Q&A session held after the two-hour keynote of Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the executive about heterogeneous computing and the ways his company is going to work in the future. Huang believes that the "Nano processor is a terrific performer", and especially likes the fact that you can get "DirectX 10 and 1080p playback for small change".

Analyst Opinion - Intel has IDF and NVIDIA has NVISION. Both shows have some similar goals, but the two couldn’t be more different.  Intel’s show is button down and professional while NVIDIA’s is a little crazy.  Intel dominates the PC hardware space and, as it often was in the Olympics last week, the real competition is for number 2, or Silver and Nvidia clearly wants that spot.   AMD plays very conservatively generally leveraging partners like Microsoft who often have their own agendas.  Nvidia is taking a much more aggressive path and while the press room I’m writing this in is sponsored by Microsoft, there is no sense at all that this is anything but an Nvidia event. 

Digital videographers know the pain and drudgery of rendering video.  Even on the fastest processors, rendering high definition H.264 footage can take minutes, even hours, but an upcoming product by Elemental Technologies promises to cut that time dramatically.  Using the stream processing power of Nvidia’s CUDA-enabled graphics cards, the Badaboom media converter will transcode video faster than real-time.  But there’s a lot more work that needs to be done because in a demonstration at the NVISION conference in San Jose, Badaboom and the upcoming Elemental Technologies plug-in for Adobe Premiere crashed frequently and sometimes refused to process AVCHD video.

LAN parties and overclocking go together like cheese and pizza, bread and butter, well you get the picture.  At the NVISION conference and lan party in San Jose this week, several overclockers are attempting to boost their processors to six gigahertz and beyond.  It’s all in the name of fun and friendly competition and “Fugger”, the owner of xtremesystems.org, showed off his three-stage cooler that chills CPUs to minus 100 degrees … that’s Celsius, not Fahrenheit.

Nvidia GPUs have become the leading processing platform within Folding@Home and continue to grow quickly: GeForce Processors are likely to become the first technology to break the 1.5 PFlops barrier.

Regular folks are just happy to own a working computer, but the attendees at the NVISION GeForce LAN party aren’t regular folks.  From glowing LEDs, water cooling blocks to a Team Fortress 2 Sentry Gun case, these guys and gals love showing off their computers while they blast each other in the latest first person shooter games.  Several hundred attendees are also trying to break the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people at a lan party in a 36 hour period.  However it really doesn’t look good so far as many of the seats in the world record section are empty.

Palit is showing off some serious graphic firepower at the Nvidia NVISION conference and LAN party over the next couple days.  An upcoming Nvidia GTX 280 card will feature an integrated water block so you don’t have to mess with those pesky cooling kits.  Another card, that’s available now, is a 9800 GTX+ with 512 MB of DDR3 RAM.  While the cards are certainly cool, Palit had some other toys that attracted much more attention.

When Nvidia announced in early July that it has noticed a higher than normal failure rate in some of its notebook chips, investors reacted concerned, sending the company stock down 22%. The stock recovered after Nvidia apparently demonstrated good control of the issue and a one-time charge of almost $200 million. But what seems to be a closed chapter and a black eye for the company could be a much more serious problem that is just taking off: Several industry sources confirmed to TG Daily what has been reported by some publications for some time: In contrast to Nvidia’s claims that only a limited number of GPUs are affected, sources indicated that “most” recent Nvidia GPUs carry the problem and a chance of failure, pushing the potential damage into stratospheric regions.

Ok so Jen-Hsun Huang’s keynote speech at NVISION wasn’t very technical, but it sure had a bunch of eye candy.  Nvidia’s CEO and co-founder showed off everything from virtual super cars to the very real and gorgeous Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica’s Cylon vixen).  “Welcome to the era of visual computing,” Huang proclaimed and there’s no doubt that over the next few days in San Jose Nvidia is pulling out all the stops in convincing attendees that its cards are best.

It’s supposed to be Nvidia’s big week in San Jose, but the people from “Unite Here” are crashing the company’s big party.  As people streamed into the city’s convention center and the Performing Arts Center for Nvidia’s keynote to be held by CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, a fluorescent green flyer was not-so-sneakily handed out to Nvision attendees on the sidewalks outside. 

Nvidia today released the second generation of CUDA, the company’s C-based programming environment that enables developers to tap into GPUs to accelerate their applications. There are several new features included, most interestingly a Photoshop plug-in example that provides guidelines how to design plug-ins that run on the GPU.

Ray-tracing is one of the big topics gamers and graphics enthusiasts should pay special attention to these days. AMD already demonstrated Transformers and Ruby Ray-traced demos using pre-rendered and real-time rendered voxels, Intel is busy working on its own ray-tracer, and now we are seeing much more obvious ray-tracing material from Nvidia as well.