NVIDIA Corp. reportedly said in an interview that one of its forthcoming drivers for the GeForce graphics cards will take advantage of multi-threaded and multi-core processors. A representative for NVIDIA suggested that multi-core chips can boost geometry performance of contemporary graphics processing units and eventually can increase performance in games by up to 30%.

TechReport web-site on Monday cited Ben de Waal, NVIDIA's Vice President of GPU software, who is reported to have said that there were several opportunities for driver performance gains with multi-threading, including vertex processing. The NVIDIA's representative said that NVIDIA's drivers did load balancing for vertex processing, offloading some work to the CPU, when the GPU was busy. This sort of vertex processing load could be spun off into a separate thread and processed in parallel.

NVIDIA claims it has plans to produce drivers that utilize the additional power of dual-core and multi-core chips. According to estimations of Mr. De Waal, dual-core processors could see performance boosts somewhere between 5% and 30% with the new drivers.

Usually server applications benefit from additional cores more than desktop software, as server programs are typically tailored for machines running two or more processors. For instance, when announcing its first dual-core chips, AMD said it expected the new dual-core server processors to deliver up to a 90% performance improvement for application servers over single-core AMD Opteron processors. The company believed desktop dual-core chips would especially benefit the so-called professional consumer and digital media enthusiasts, as well as those who run many software applications simultaneously.

NVIDIA did not provide any exact release dates for drivers that benefit from multi-cores, but said in the near future it would release drivers that improve multi-GPU support.

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