Cool Hardware and Tegra @ The GPU Tech Conference Show Floor

While already available in the US, here's our first look at the Microsoft Zune HD portable media player - thin, light, handy, a bright display and a glossy front finish that will leave it all smudged and ugly in no time.

Navigation is extremely simple and surprisingly very snappy - probably a testament of the Tegra processor within.

Here's watching the new G.I. Joe movie trailers - the Zune HD automatically rotates the video to suit the format that's best to view it on. Take note that while the Zune HD can't display HD quality on the screen (a limitation of the OLED screen resolution chosen), it can output 720p HD videos with ease.

Here's the Zune HD on the optional dock that's needed to output its content on screen and can be controlled via a remote.

The Samsung M1 portable media player is also powered by NVIDIA Tegra. However, its menu system is all in another language that we couldn't decipher, so we couldn't toy with it much.

And here are is a pair of mini notebooks or netbooks from Mobinnova that are also powered by the NVIDIA Tegra. It will be interesting to pit this against current netbook platforms to see how they handle general multimedia as well as battery uptime and usability. We guess we'll find out in a couple of months.

Here we have one of NVIDIA's Quadro based scalable visualization solutions able to span applications across eight displays, drive 4K projectors or panels and support 3D stereo. And its busy serving up an expansive display from Google Earth in this example.

Here's a closer look at the Dell Precision Quadro Plex system driving this visual treat.

And here are the displays again, but this time focusing on Mount Fuji in Japan - a really beautiful sight to behold even if its seen virtually.

This is perhaps the world's first system outfitted with eight Tesla C1060 cards delivering a total of 8 teraFLOPS of computing power. Most others are still designed to fit only four of those Tesla cards in a system. Colfax International is the solutions provider for this personal supercomputer as well as many other variants.

Here's a closer look of this monster system which runs a dual Nehalem-class Intel 2-way Xeon processor system with up to 144GB of system memory.

Scalable Display Technologies is one of the more successful software providers for multi-projector display systems. Shown here is a curved screen experience to provide a more immersive feel in simulation and the likes.

This is achieved via dual projectors screening on the curved screen in conjunction with Scalable's EasyBlend software to provide edge blending and color matching from multi-projector displays. They've even done a 240-degree solution with five projectors with a recent partner, RTI.

How about remote 3D graphics horsepower and the ability expand and locate this solution almost anywhere? That's what Cubix is offering with optical fiber connections and they claim to have the fastest remote 3D graphics solutions. Their Cubix solutions come in a variety of configurations and this one shown here without the GPUs can cost about US$4000. It's a convenient solution to expand outside of a limited server rack space and yet maintain the performance edge.

Here's a localized rendering demo shown by Cubix on their solution. On discussion with them, they mentioned that operational distances can go up to 2 kilometers or more and yet maintain performance as though the solution is located locally. Best part is that there's no video compression involved and it maintains output pixel-for-pixel.

Last but not least, Zebra Imaging was also present at the show floor to showcase its hologram solution examples. The process of creating these holograms involves computational processing power and GPUs play a part here too. While the photo might not be too convincing, in real-life, the holograms are really a page from science fiction. These holograms can be useful in manufacturing, building and medical industries where visualization is key.

Dimensional Imaging had their 3D Facial Capture System on show which utilizes 4 cameras mounted in fixed positions to capture these profile shots of a person.

Using their capture software, it then processes the photos to this 3D model which can be further manipulated.

The software is optimized to take advantage of NVIDIA GPUs through NVIDIA CUDA and their breakdown shows you what steps to create the model are sped up most.

The orange bars in this graph show a relative comparison using an Intel CPU for the same process which takes much more time than using the GPU.

Here we have showcase of augmented reality taking place - we were so busy the whole day if only that pack of cookies were real! This booth setup was from seac02 promoting their linceo release 3.1 software.

Still at the same booth, another display of augmented reality where the pad was the designated marker for the grasshopper to be jumping while the view was being manipulated by the headset worn by the exhibitor. The software used is built on OpenCL, so this will run any graphics card that supports it.

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