ITE221 - Fall 2011 - Chapter 7

Site reviewed: http://www.nvidia.com/page/home.html

For Chapter 7, I reviewed Nvidia.com’s US website. Nvidia is one of the two major manufacturers of video cards and integrated-video chipsets (the other being Advanced Micro Devices). As is typical for manufacturers’ websites, Nvidia’s has links to their products, to places where they may be purchased, a user-community forum for discussions relating to their products, a downloads section for acquiring updated drivers for their products, and a troubleshooting/customer support section.  Also on their front page were promotional links to some of their top draws, in this case to their new 3D display technology, a new Sony tablet using an Nvidia chipset, a GPU technology conference taking place in Beijing in December, and instructions on how to get a free copy of the upcoming game ‘Batman: Arkham City’ with the purchase of one of Nvidia’s graphics cards. Below the main links described above, there are also assorted other text links, including a sweepstakes giving away an Alienware laptop (one in October and one in November), information geared towards use of Nvidia’s business-related graphics cards, and promotional materials about Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs as used in parallel processing and heterogeneous computing, which will be one of the topics at SC2011 in Seattle (SC 2011 is a conference on supercomputing, being held in Seattle WA in November; the keynote speech will be given by the CEO of Nvidia).

As always, a manufacturer’s website will be biased in favor of its own products, but for a place to start research on graphics capabilities in modern computers, to acquire specs on existing hardware, or to troubleshoot a malfunctioning GPU, Nvidia would be a good place to start.