Back in 2007, Nvidia’s graphics processing unit (GPU)-based accelerators were ubiquitous at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) annual convention. Two years on, Nvidia continues to dominate the scene with its Quadro range of graphics accelerators and the Tesla GPU-based compute engines.
On the Landmark booth, a quad-screen display was showing a staggering 32 megapixels of seismic scenery, albeit with a rather ugly wide bezel.
Mechdyne’s Mosaic was showing a zero bezel display of 4 x HD (1920 x 1080) along with great 3D (with glasses—but these are getting much more wearable).
On the 3D front, Mechdyne was also showing a spectacular prototype Sony 3D LED backlit TV—a taste of things to come in the home cinema? Maybe there is a tipping point here as the 3D on these displays is of an immediacy that has been lacking previously—like the glasses, it is just less of an intrusion.
Down at the programming level, the 8.1 release of Visualization Sciences Group’s (VSG—previously TGS) Open Inventor toolkit, under the hood of many upstream applications, embeds Nvidia’s ‘CompleX’ scene-scaling acceleration engine. VSG was used, inter alia, by CGGVeritas to show off its seismic library.
On the HP stand, a $5,000 laptop with a 3D Quadro FX3700M was demoing SMT’s Kingdom Suite—described as the ‘democratization’ of 3D.
Finally, Nvidia announced that Hess is deploying the HP Z800/Nvidia SLI multi OS workstation we reported on earlier this year (OITJ June 2009).
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