Yakiimo3D » Personal

NVIDIA GTX 460

yakiimo02 — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 06:55:48 +0000

A picture of my new graphics card.

http://www.geeks3d.com/20100712/nvidia-geforce-gtx-460-specifications-and-reviews-available/
Geeks3D’s article on the GTX 460.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nsight.html
I recently learned via Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/NIV_Anteru/status/30620618055483392) that the Pro edition of NVIDIA’s Parallel Nsight is now free. This news is one reason why I bought a new GTX 460. In order to fully use Parallel Nsight on a single machine though, I need separate graphics card for display and for running CUDA. I was hoping I could use my HD5750 somehow, but using multiple display drivers is not even supported in Vista (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/multimonVista.mspx), so I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere trying on my Vista system. I’m probably going to buy another CUDA capable graphics card.

http://3dmark.com/3dm11/595018
Ran 3DMark 11 on my new card. As expected, since it came out later, I get a better score than my old HD5750 (http://www.yakiimo3d.com/2010/12/12/3dmark-11/).

Felt a little sad taking out my Radeon HD5750 (http://www.yakiimo3d.com/2009/12/13/my-radeon-hd5750/), which has served me well. The HD5750 cost me around 16,000 yen (w/ current strong yen around $191) and the new GTX 460 cost me around 13,000 yen (around $155). Since I don’t play much PC games, I usually buy inexpensive mid-range graphics cards, so financially, I don’t feel wasteful upgrading after a year. With my new graphics card, I get increased performance, ability to run CUDA samples, ability to run double-precision float programs and try out Parallel Nsight once I get a 2nd graphics card.

(2011/02/13 update)
http://www.yakiimo3d.com/2011/02/13/parallel-nsight-1-51-2/
I ended up trying Parallel Nsight. Seems useful on single GPU systems.

Posted my very first youtube video!

yakiimo02 — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:48:39 +0000

The above is my very first youtube video post! It’s a video of a CPU implementation of bitonic sort. In the demo, a StructuredBuffer of random data is first sorted in increasing order. Then without re-randomizing, the same data is sorted in decreasing order. DirectX 11 was used for rendering. Something I found interesting is that the pixel shader could load and draw the StructuredBuffer without any intermediate transfers to a texture. Not an exciting demo of DirectX 11, but I have to start somewhere.

The demo was inspired by t-pot.com’s pixel shader bitonic sort demo (http://www.t-pot.com/program/90_BitonicSort/index.html). My next post will be an article about the above CPU implementation with full source code.

My Radeon HD5750

yakiimo02 — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:19:24 +0000

I posted pics of my Radeon HD5750 on my hatena diary page when I got it last month.

2009/11/21SAPPHIRE HD 5750 1GB GDDR5 PCIE HDMI/DP video card pics (Hatena Diary)

The card quickly got unboxed and inserted into my machine. Since buying it, I’ve used my free time not spent playing games (Demon’s Souls, Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time, and Modern Warefare 2 are all so good…), looking over and studying the DirectX SDK samples for DirectX11.

I plan on posting a DirectX11 CPU bitonic sort sample followed by a compute shader bitonic sort sample soon. I know the DirectX SDK contains a bitonic sort compute shader sample, but it was a good topic for me to begin my studies. I’ll try to cover the bitonic sort algorithm more in depth than the DirectX SDK.