Simviation Forums

Anyone know if CUDA helps out flight sim. I did a quick search on this site and others and there appears to be no discussions about it. My understanding is that with the right NVIDIA card and drivers CUDA enables the GBU to take on some of the CPU load when its idle or has extra processes remaining. My thought was that since Flight Sim is so CPU dependent that there might be some advantages.

none

Simple answer. I like it... Thanks.

For a flight simulator, there are potential advantages to pushing off some of the processing to the GPU, particularly when it comes to handling matrix math.

For FSX it doesn't offer any advantages (as Nick so succinctly put it). CUDA allows an application to take advantage of the GPU, but only if it is designed to do so. FSX is not. FSX would not be helped by CUDA for a number of reasons. First, it would tie you using an nVidia card. Second, for an application like FSX, the actual vehicle simulation is a relatively small slice of the processing time. The big bottle necks are graphics and dynamic loading of terrain data. The graphics usually already loading your GPU to capacity. The loading time is helped greatly by having a multi-core processor, but would not be helped at all by moving to the GPU.

CUDA does not enable automatic shared processing... it is merely an interface through which an application can be coded to use the GPU as a general-purpose processor... and it applies more to scientific applications than to gaming... such that nVidia released the Tesla variant of the 8800 series cards, which are just processing modules, with no video output, to be specifically used by CUDA enabled applications.

Cheers