NVIDIA OpenCL drivers now publicly available

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NVIDIA was the first one to announce OpenCL drivers conformant to the spec back in June, and now they’ve move the ball to the goal line by announcing this week that those drivers are publicly available (back in June they were only available to registered developers).

From the insideHPC inbox

nVidia logoNVIDIA today released the first public OpenCL conformant GPU drivers for Windows and Linux.

In addition to the drivers themselves, NVIDIA has released a powerful performance profiling tool and an OpenCL Best Practices Guide.

NVIDIA was the first to release beta OpenCL GPU drivers to developers in April 2009.This public release is fully conformant with the OpenCL v1.0 specification and supports the OpenCL Images features of the specification that, while optional for other vendors, provides significant performance benefits across many image processing disciplines such as medical imaging, video transcoding applications, machine vision and facial detection.

Leveraging the extensive performance instrumentation in NVIDIA’s OpenCL drivers and hardware performance signals designed into NVIDIA GPUs, the OpenCL Visual Profiler provides developers with insight into performance bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization.

Key features include:

  • Timing of memory copies between system memory and GPU dedicated memory
  • Customizable graphs to help developers focus in on problem areas
  • Basic auto-analysis to reveal warp serialization problems
  • Easy import/export to CSV for custom analysis
  • Support for all CUDA enabled GPUs
  • Profiling of actual hardware signals, kernel efficiency, and instruction issue rate