CUDA, PhysX coming to notebooks

Paul Taylor | Dec 24, 2008 9:20 AM

Notebook users will appreciate some good news coming out of the Nvidia camp.

The company has announced it will be releasing unified drivers for the Geforce and Quadro notebook market. The new drivers will enable CUDA and Physx right out of the box, in case your notebook GPU can do the work.

This signals a couple of good things for users. From now on, driver development and availability will rely on the Green Goblin rather than the notebook manufacturers, meaning the usual waiting for new drivers to come along -if at all - will be over. Together with CUDA and Physx this brings some free candy for current users.

We can only imagine that, if turning on PhysX on a desktop will be murder on your framerate, doing so on a notebook will be twice as much. But we can see where GPGPU/CUDA will bring some comfort to the crowds (video encoding, etc), if they so wish. The unified driver will also lend a helping with Adobe CS4 and some well known distributed computing apps.

Right now you can only pick up the Beta version of the unified driver package, but the fully-tested WHQL-certified version will be available at the beginning of the year, says NV.