NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 Video Card Preview

A Closer Look at the GeForce GT 240

The Ideal GPU for Todays Visual Computing Applications

Expectations and usage models for todays mainstream PCs are quite different than they were three to five years ago, where email, simple Websurfing, and business applications ruled the day. With the explosion in usage of Web-based social networking site likesFacebook and Myspace, online video communities like Youtube and Vimeo, in addition to photo sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket, PCs must not only be capable of displaying rich media content but also creating and editing such content.

The GeForce GT 240 is the best price-performing GPU on the market today for such visual computing tasks. Many PCs in the world today utilize mid-range to low-end CPUs, and include under performing integrated graphics solutions. These PCs do fine with basic Web surfing and email, but they cant provide great experiences when producing, editing, or displaying HD video, or manipulating large number of photos, or playing new games. These advanced features can be enabled by integrating a GeForce GT 240 into mainstream systems.

Over the past year many rich media consumer applications have adopted CUDA C, the worlds most pervasive GPU programming language. Using CUDA, software vendors such as CyberLink, Nero, ArcSoft, Elemental Technologies, and MotionDSP have achieved performance speedups of 2-20x over the CPU, while providing higher image and video quality as well. Many new mainstream PC usage cases made possible with the GeForce GT240 and NVIDIA CUDA technology such as:

• Enhancing video captured on cell phones or shot in poor lighting conditions with MotionDSPs vReveal
• Converting HD video for use with handheld devices using BadaBoom, Cyberlink Media Show Expresso, Nero Move It, and TMPGEnc
• Editing HD movies and applying filters with Cyberlink Power Director 7 and Loiloscope Venus
• Editing photos and applying filters with Adobe Photoshop CS4 (CS4 is OpenGL-enabled)
• Organizing photos using GPU accelerated facial recognition antagging with Cyberlink MediaShow 5
• Enjoying high-quality DVD upscaling with ArcSoft SimHD

In each visual computing application, the GeForce GT 240 provides a dramatic improvement in performance over a CPU only system.