NVIDIA release OpenCL GPU drivers for Linux and Windows

Monday 28th September 2009, 09:38:00 PM, written by Rys

NVIDIA have released certified OpenCL drivers for Windows and Linux, after passing conformance tests at Khronos in June.  The Windows version is available for XP, Vista and 7, both 32- and 64-bit in all cases, and is tagged 190.89 for driver version number spotters.

The Linux one is 190.29 and is available for 32- and 64-bit just like the Windows version.  Both OSes get support for the visual profiler, and any CUDA-capable GPU is an OpenCL compatible one, from G80 all the way up, and including Tesla T10-powered hardware in the compute space too.

You can get everything you need to get started on NVIDIA's OpenCL download page, and their OpenCL pages in general are a reasonable jump off point for OpenCL in general, taking you to Khronos, samples and what have you with just a couple of clicks.

And thus starts my tools dev for our OpenCL testing suite.
Discuss on the forums

Tagging

nvidia ± opencl, cuda, compute, conformance, khronos


Latest Thread Comments (334 total)
Posted by Dade on Saturday, 02-Jan-10 17:48:56 UTC
Quoting Jawed
http://sa09.idav.ucdavis.edu/
Thanks, very useful and interesting :!:

Posted by Arnold Beckenbauer on Thursday, 14-Jan-10 19:44:55 UTC
Some more details on the GPU3 core, regarding OpenCL (http://folding.typepad.com/news/2010/01/some-more-details-on-the-gpu3-core-regarding-opencl.html)

Quote
This means that the core will only roll out for NVIDIA first. *ATI has depreciated Brook, but does not have a fully-functioning OpenCL implementation,* so we are stuck in between support on the ATI side. Once the OpenCL implementation matures (on both ATI and NVIDIA), we will be able to finish and optimize our OpenCL code (we can't reliably optimize code until the implementations are more finalized), and then the OpenCL portions will go into QA
How is this possible?

Posted by mhouston on Thursday, 14-Jan-10 20:12:58 UTC
Sigh, the *OpenMM OpenCL port is not fully functional*, the AMD implementation is fully functional and many other software packages and projects are already using it. For example, we showed a bunch of computational chemistry/bio/physics apps running on AMD's implementation (both CPU and GPU) at Supercomputing. You can also see around these forums that our OpenCL implementation is pretty good, although not without bugs. Vijay was not sufficiently clear in that post. GPU3 is running CUDA on Nvidia, not OpenCL. The OpenCL port is not working completely anywhere (although I just fixed a bug preventing both Nvidia's and AMD's latest implementations from working at all...) and the base port was just completed at the end of last year. Now it is entering testing and tuning.And, Brook runs just fine still, but it is no longer in active development by AMD, it has transitioned back to a fully opensource project as we said we would do.

Posted by entity279 on Thursday, 14-Jan-10 21:44:17 UTC
Quoting mhouston
Vijay was not sufficiently clear in that post..
Yeah but unclear is one thing, and saying AMD's implementation is not fully functional is another. It is plain false.

Or do they have some specific feature in mind when they say it?

Posted by mhouston on Thursday, 14-Jan-10 22:09:28 UTC
It's true that OpenMM on AMD's OpenCL is not currently fully functional, i.e. there is a bug found on compiling 2 kernels making our GPU compiler unhappy, but we are seeing some other issues that haven't been tracked yet.

Posted by Arnold Beckenbauer on Thursday, 14-Jan-10 22:58:10 UTC
The HD4000s do not support OpenCL's Local Memory: Is it a big problem for the GPU3 core?
(Ok, assuming HD4000s can run the GPU3 core)

Posted by mhouston on Thursday, 14-Jan-10 22:59:57 UTC
We don't know yet what the performance impact will be. It will be kernel dependent for sure and have a lot to do with ALU/Bandwidth ratio of the code.

Posted by Arnold Beckenbauer on Friday, 15-Jan-10 00:01:33 UTC
Ok. But why don't you port the old ATi physics demos to OpenCL? :lol:

Posted by Jawed Geeking Out with AMD OpenCL on Thursday, 21-Jan-10 23:01:05 UTC
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/01/18/geeking_out_amd_opencl Jawed

Posted by Dade on Friday, 22-Jan-10 17:36:35 UTC
Quoting Arnold Beckenbauer
Ok. But why don't you port the old ATi physics demos to OpenCL? :lol:
Few OpenCL/Physic related links I have seen in the latest days:- http://code.google.com/p/bullet/issues/detail?id=336 (http://bulletphysics.org/)- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33rU1axSKhQ


Add your comment in the forums

Related nvidia News

So long, Chris, and thanks for all the fish
NVIDIA GF100 graphics architecture details
NVIDIA Fermi: new GPU architecture, starting with GF100
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 at $250 to fight HD 4890
A look at NVIDIA's SLI Multi-OS and new Quadros
Ahead Nero gets CUDA support for video encoding
G92b renamed again, this time for notebooks
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 announced
New NVIDIA display driver for Windows 7 beta
NVIDIA Q4: Revenue as awful as expected, margins/income miss