CUDA Music Visualisation / CUDA Visualization

In: CUDA Music Visualization|Full HD|HD Music Visualization|Music Visualisation

If you haven’t already heard the word is no longer ‘bird’ its now CUDA. CUDA is going to be big. Scratch that CUDA is already big.

What is CUDA? well essentially there is two big computer graphics cards producers – ATI (that makes the RADEON cards most notably) and NVIDIA. The battle between these two is as virulent as any other human 2 sided fight, the balance for power swings one way to the other switching between each company with new series of cards just outdoing the other. This is ongoing and gamers fight it out constantly. This is not important. What’s important is that they seem to have split with their intentions for their high end graphics cards.

ATI seem to be putting a lot of R+D money into multiscreen – that is if you wanted to stick 3 screens in a line and play a more immersive version of a game ATI cards would arguably be better. Of course the finer details of this are not specific and I am no graphics card geek so I could be off the mark with this. Again ATI cards are good at the moment but this is not important.

Whats important is NVIDIA’s CUDA. CUDA is in short the opening up of the graphics card to programmers. CUDA allows programmers to use the brute force of these horrifically fast new graphics cards to run programs of their own creation. Think a cross between cutting edge graphics capacity and open source freedom. In short CUDA will allow cutting edge CUDA Music Visualisations, or at least it will in theory. To play about with Nvidia’s CUDA all you need is a fairly modern nvidia card (I think cards from about £300 currently upwards all are CUDA enabled) and a bit of programming skill. There are some fantastic developments already coming out of this new freedom of access to these new cards – the higher end new Nvidia cards that are about to hit (480GTX etc) will have some ridiculous number of cores like 512 – essentially making them more powerful than 10′s of current home computers…in one graphics card.

So with a bit of luck some of you fantastic graphics programmers (and perhaps I will even get some time at the end of the summer) will start writing some fantastic hd music visualisations in CUDA. If anyone see’s CUDA music visualizations online anywhere or at any gigs please do comment here!

Anyway watch this space people – YES YES NVIDIA CUDA MUSIC VISUALISATIONS (VISUALIZATIONS if your coming from the US!)