nvidia 540 GT Video Card

[Danny Hays]

If the specs say it has Cuda cores, it can help with AVCHD rendering only.

[Daljit Ajimal]

Thanks Danny, that makes it clear.

[Danny Hays]

I’ve read Vegas Pro 10d is supposed to use GPU from other cards than just NVidea. Not for preview though, just AVCHD rendering. That’s what my main camera shoots anyway. That i7 laptop should work great with Vegas. Now I want one.

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, they claim to be supporting OpenCL. The current Vegas supports CUDA, which is a nVidia-only thing.

ATi/AMD have their own branded interface, Stream. Stream actually covers a bunch of interfaces. It used to include a low-level GPGPU interface called “close to metal”, but that’s been deprecated. OpenCL is now AMD’s go-to interface for GPGPU; Stream also included other GPU-related bits, like Windows-standard interfaces, things like DXVA and DirectCompute support (also managed by nVidia, but not necessarily listed as part of CUDA). DirectCompute is Microsoft’s “native” answer to OpenCL. No one uses it 🙂

OpenCL is, oddly enough given the name, an open spec, and is now supported by nVidia as well. OpenCL programs should be able to use nVidia, AMD, eventually even Intel GPUs as general purpose computing engines (if Intel ever gets around to building that kind of GPU). Since OpenCL was released after CUDA (and maybe because it originated at Apple, but is now independently managed by the Khronos Group), support has been lagging.

It may also reflect the fact that AMD’s been on a roll. They’ve increased GPU sales 15.4% (24.8% total), while nVidia as dropped 28.4% (20% total). And Intel’s hanging out at just over 50%… if they do deliver a GPGPU capable GPU at some point, every cheap PC will have it, and it won’t run CUDA either.

It may also help that nVidia is falling behind AMD in GPU sales these days

-Dave