NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 2.3 Released

By DE Editors

NVIDIA has released version 2.3 of the CUDA Toolkit and SDK for GPU computing. This latest release supports several new features designed to help get the most performance out of NVIDIA's massively parallel CUDA-enabled GPUs. This release of the CUDA Toolkit includes performance improvements and expanded support for the cuda-gdb hardware debugger.

Additional new features in CUDA Toolkit 2.3 include:

• The CUFFT Library now supports double-precision transforms and includes performance improvements for single-precision transforms as well.
• The CUDA-GDB hardware debugger and CUDA Visual Profiler are now included in the CUDA Toolkit installer, and the CUDA-GDB debugger is now available for all supported Linux distros.
• Each GPU in an SLI group is now enumerated individually, so compute applications can now take advantage of multi-GPU performance even when SLI is enabled for graphics.
• The 64-bit versions of the CUDA Toolkit now support compiling 32-bit applications.
• New support for fp16 <-> fp32 conversion intrinsics allows storage of data in fp16 format with computation in fp32. Use of fp16 format is ideal for applications that require higher numerical range than 16-bit integer but less precision than fp32 and reduces memory space and bandwidth consumption.

The CUDA SDK has been updated to include:

• A new pitchLinearTexure code sample that shows how to efficiently texture from pitch linear memory.
• A new PTXJIT code sample illustrating how to use cuModuleLoadDataEx() to load PTX source from memory instead of loading a file.
• Two new code samples for Windows, showing how to use the NVCUVID library to decode MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264 content and pass frames to OpenGL or Direct3D for display.
• Updated code samples showing how to properly align CUDA kernel function parameters so the same code works on both x32 and x64 systems.

Developers can download the latest CUDA Toolkit, SDK, and drivers at NVIDIA’s forums.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.