nVidia goes multithreading with its drivers

nVidia has now released information on plans to release ForceWare drivers for its GeForce-series that supports multithreading. Which means that processors that can work with several threads will get a considerable increase in performance in 3D-applications such as games. The announcement is timed perfectly with the current dual-core hysteria. nVidiasays that systems with dual-core processors will gain up to 30% with multithreaded drivers. The process of developing multithreaded drivers is a long and difficult one which probably means that nVidia has been working on this for a long time.

“Out of curiosity, I asked de Waal why NVIDIA’s drivers don’t already take advantage of a second CPU. After all, the driver is a separate task from the application calling it, and Hyper-Threaded and SMP systems are rather common. He explained that drivers in Windows normally run synchronously with the applications making API calls, so that they must return an answer before the API call is complete. On top of that, Windows drivers run in kernel mode, so the OS isn’t particularly amenable to multithreaded drivers. NVIDIA has apparently been working on multithreaded drivers for some time now, and they’ve found a way to fudge around the OS limitations.”

There will be a few months before we will actually see drivers with multithreading support, but if nVidia’s statement is correct this is a big pro for AMD and Intel’s dual-core processors.

Source: Tech Report