Before Windows 7 came out, I read a few articles like this one:
AMD, Nvidia Expect Windows 7 to Improve Visual Experience, Boost GPU Performance - X-bit labs
Does anyone know how this works? Do we need to install something special? How can we tell it's working? Does it offer any real world benefit?
They are referring to using the GPU in tandem with the CPU or by itself for certain tasks. for example you can get a version of folding@home (actually bundled in the ATI Cat suite) that uses the gpu instead of the cpu for all the work
Or like MediaShow Espresso to encode video really damn fast.
Yes CUDA is where you write applications to run on the GPU. But CUDA is an NVIDIA thing. The improvements to Windows 7 driver model are supposed to be widespread amongst all GPUs that support it. I have yet to actually see those improvements though.
Is it enabled by default? How can we tell if it's working?
Maybe, but only in WDDM 1.1 compatible drivers. And will you ever notice it? Probably not.
Windows 7 Way Smarter With Graphics RAM - Tom's Hardware
Problems with Cuda version 2.3 installing on windows 7 home premium can be dealt with by not installing the 2.3 driver but going right to the driver downloads and downloading the 191 version then the cuda toolbox then the SDK runs nice. One small hiccup during install but the 190 version that comes with the Cuda 2.3 set crashes every time and leaves the drivers in a shambles.
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