Nvdia and FIRST?

[Zach O]

They had a booth at CMP, so there's some sort of something there

[Doug Frisk]

Originally Posted by Zach O

They had a booth at CMP, so there's some sort of something there

I'll take two of these. Given that they explicitly mention robotics and robotic vision uses they would be a great fit.

[T^2]

They gave away some pretty nice t-shirts and flash drives at Champs. By far the most consumer-friendly booth there. Here's hoping for more graphics cards next year.

[cadandcookies]

In 2011 they gave every team at the Lake Superior Regional a GTX 480 graphics card to kickstart our CAD computers. I'm betting they've done the same in other years. Also their booth is always cool at Champs.

[Tom Line]

Yep, the past NViDIA handouts were incredibly nice. Unfortunately FIRST chose to NOT do this at district events - so folks in districts make yourselves heard so we don't get left out again.

We purchased some of the cards from FIRST Choice to put in computers. They were a huge upgrade over what we had.

[guniv]

I own a Nvidia Shield personally and in my opinion it would be super cool if you could run a driver station off of it. Maybe the coolest handheld out there right now.

[yash101]

I've always been wondering what NVidia has been working in the background. This seems to be a completely revolutionary product, especially in the ARM departement! This is the first, yeah, first time that I have seen a SoC capable of CUDA and OpenGL, and possibly even OpenCL!

I need to get my hands on one of those! The hardware is good enough for some Minecraft!

NVidia is already a market leader, and I am scared what will come next!

[JagCode]

Originally Posted by guniv

I own a Nvidia Shield personally and in my opinion it would be super cool if you could run a driver station off of it. Maybe the coolest handheld out there right now.

I'm sure if you dug around enough, you could boot a custom version of Linux onto your Shield, then download the unofficial Linux Driver Station onto it.

[StillDefective]

Originally Posted by JagCode

I'm sure if you dug around enough, you could boot a custom version of Linux onto your Shield, then download the unofficial Linux Driver Station onto it.

Android is Linux based, and various people are working on an Android DS as well, so it wouldn't be very hard.

[BigJ]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

Yep, the past NViDIA handouts were incredibly nice. Unfortunately FIRST chose to NOT do this at district events - so folks in districts make yourselves heard so we don't get left out again.

We purchased some of the cards from FIRST Choice to put in computers. They were a huge upgrade over what we had.

It wasn't at all regionals - only those specifically sponsored by nVidia (I have no clue if any districts were specifically sponsored by nVidia though).

[JohnFogarty]

Originally Posted by BigJ

It wasn't at all regionals - only those specifically sponsored by nVidia (I have no clue if any districts were specifically sponsored by nVidia though).

Yeah, the last time they did that the Palmetto regional was 2010.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

In 2011 they gave every team at the Lake Superior Regional a GTX 480 graphics card to kickstart our CAD computers. I'm betting they've done the same in other years. Also their booth is always cool at Champs.

Not sure how much help this'll be if teams are running autodesk inventor - I've got a GTX 780 and it still runs like crap

If only I had a free solidworks license...

[yash101]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Not sure how much help this'll be if teams are running autodesk inventor - I've got a GTX 780 and it still runs like crap

If only I had a free solidworks license...

That's a gaming card. It's not meant to paint excessive resolution images to the screeen. Those chips are meant to paint regular HD images to the screen really quickly.

The performance shouldn't be horrible, though. You probably have an i5 or an i7 (or maybe an AMD alternative)! The integrated graphics should be capable of running the program pretty well!

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by yash101

That's a gaming card. It's not meant to paint excessive resolution images to the screeen. Those chips are meant to paint regular HD images to the screen really quickly.

The performance shouldn't be horrible, though. You probably have an i5 or an i7 (or maybe an AMD alternative)! The integrated graphics should be capable of running the program pretty well!

I'm not talking about rendering performance, I'm talking about performance while actually working in the application. It's slow and unwieldy at all times, and has always been this way on every machine I've ever run it on.

[Chris_Ely]

Originally Posted by yash101

That's a gaming card. It's not meant to paint excessive resolution images to the screeen. Those chips are meant to paint regular HD images to the screen really quickly.

The performance shouldn't be horrible, though. You probably have an i5 or an i7 (or maybe an AMD alternative)! The integrated graphics should be capable of running the program pretty well!

The GPU chips are actually the same in many cases and based on the same architecture, just optimized for different tasks. What makes workstation cards (Quadros) and gaming cards (GeForce) different is the drivers, build quality, and validation. The drivers of gaming cards are optimized for maximum frames per second (FPS), while workstation cards are optimized for image quality. Workstation cards also follow the reference design from the GPU manufacturer, ie. every card is the same. Workstation cards also undergo validation for hundreds of professional applications, which is why they cost more. The first 3.5 minutes of this video explains the difference well.
But you can still run Inventor on a gaming card. I run Inventor on my laptop which has a GeForce GTX 650m, a Core i7 @ 2.3GHz - 3.2GHz (Turbo), and 16GB of RAM. Inventor runs perfectly fine.

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I'm not talking about rendering performance, I'm talking about performance while actually working in the application. It's slow and unwieldy at all times, and has always been this way on every machine I've ever run it on.

The main factor in in-application performance is going to be the CPU clock speed. Autodesk recommends at least 3.0GHz. The RAM amount will affect the size and amount of parts that can be open and worked on at a time. The hard drive speed will affect how fast parts load and save. GPU and CPU cores will affect rendering times.