For graphics cards, drivers are everything: it’s just not possible to be on top of stability, performance, and functionality without access to new, stable drivers. But for Windows notebooks, unlike desktops, traditionally you had to turn to OEM PC vendors to get your NVIDIA graphics drivers. That would be fine, if PC vendors kept pace, but my near-universal experience has been that vendors are awful about drivers. Just finding drivers on many sites is a Herculean task, let alone getting something up-to-date.

That had meant that, for GPU gurus, the only alternative was a site like laptopvideo2go.com. That site is an awesome resource, with in-depth detailed descriptions of every new build (stable and experimental) from NVIDIA. To get the latest and greatest, you can use mods that allow these drivers to be installed on notebooks without having to go through your notebook vendor.

But nice as that is, it’s still terrific news that NVIDIA has finally made the switch to offering their drivers directly on their site. Now, when you go to NVIDIA.com, you get a prominent, front-page option for downloading notebook drivers:

NVIDIA Notebook Drivers

This covers just about everything, thanks to NVIDIA’s unified driver model. (NVS and GeForce are both there.) Notably missing: workstation-quality Quadro FX drivers. But this is still major progress. Both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista and XP are covered.

This is a non-issue for Apple users, of course, and NVIDIA has long offered direct downloads for Linux (in addition to open source, community-supported drivers), but it’s great news for Windows users.

It specifically allows NVIDIA to push the beta of release 179 before the certified drivers become available. I hope this also means that, with added feedback, we’ll get more reliable NVIDIA mobile drivers.

NVIDIA also now prominently links to their Graphics Plus campaign, which promotes the use of your GPU for tasks like GPGPU and PhysX. There are tons of downloads there, though in the past those haven’t been officially supported on notebooks; with the beta, they are. I’m giving them a try later today on my NVIDIA 9500M GT to how they run with this new beta driver release. One big bonus for visualists: a chance to get faster video encoding. Being a fan of open standards, I’m still rooting for OpenCL in place of NVIDIA’s proprietary CUDA technology for processing on the GPU, but there’s no question NVIDIA does a lot to promote the science of GPU use. (And, for the record, NVIDIA has also pledged to support and promote OpenCL alongside CUDA.)

In fact, NVIDIA is specifically pushing these new notebook drivers for these features:

• Video applications
• Distributed computing (GPUGRID, Folding@home, and the like)
• PhysX in games like EA’s upcoming PC release of Mirror’s Edge (get the Dramamine handy!)

What about ATI? They helpfully let you select your notebook graphics card on the driver download page, then respond with:

Currently AMD does not provide any driver support for Mobility Radeon™ products. All driver and technical support for Mobility Radeon™ products is provided by the original laptop or notebook manufacturer. The drivers that are available for download at ati.amd.com are for desktop products only.

To download Windows Vista Mobility Radeon™ drivers or driver updates for your laptop or notebook product, please visit your laptop or notebook manufacturer’s website.

Ah, yes, because really, there’s nothing computer users enjoy more than dealing with notebook manufacturers. So, ATI, I hope you follow NVIDIA’s lead on this. If they can do it, so can you. We love your stuff, so help us run the latest drivers, okay? (By the way, does anyone know if there’s an ATI equivalent of laptopvideo2go?)

Thanks to Josh Ott (of superDraw fame) for the tip!

In William Gibson’s novel Spook Country released last year, artists create a new generation of “locative art.” Peer through goggles at a real-world scene, and see something that isn’t literally there. Few would say it was Gibson’s best novel – perhaps partly because the plotline didn’t live up to how compelling the locative art ideas were. But the art has already moved from science fiction into reality.

Running Vista? Running Processing? This is important: you’ll want to apply this fix if working with fullscreen apps (as you would be as a live visualist). The short version: there’s a property to set if you’re working in an IDE (Eclipse / NetBeans. If you’re just working in Processing, the easiest thing to do is to download Processing 0156 with Java included rather than the “expert” version. But if you’re interested in knowing the gory details, here goes:

Since its official announcement in July, Resolume 3 has been causing excitement with its cross-platform, beatmatched, AV, VST-compatible next-level-ishness. Peter and I have had a great time playing with the private beta, but we know that the real capabilities of new software don’t appear until the public starts messing with it.

Public, it’s time to start messing!

Resolume Avenue 3 Getting Started from Bart van der Ploeg on Vimeo.

Resolume 3 is now also available for purchase: €299/€499/€649 for a 1/2/3 machine license (Mac and/or PC), with Resolume’s friendly update model which gives you all point release updates for free.

From the developers:

This is a beta because it has some rough edges and not all features have been implemented yet. We hope you can all have a look and let us know what bugs you find, we expect there will be some.

The main features that have not been implemented yet are Flash playback, audio FFT analysis and DMX support. But we are working on these features right now and they will be available as free updates.

We’ll have more to say about Avenue when we’ve had some time with this new version, but I want to keep as little text as possible between you and the software. So:
Download Resolume Avenue 3.
Feature Set.
Resolume 3 Manual.
Beta feedback on the forums.

Enjoy!

Using video in Processing is, sadly, really painful. You can do absolutely wonderful things once it’s working — pixel-by-pixel manipulations that are hard to do elsewhere, and easily-coded OpenGL manipulations that should help generate powerful eye candy. But the list of issues runs something like this:

• Windows doesn’t support capture without the addition of the buggy WinVDIG, which often doesn’t work properly.
• Linux doesn’t support anything.
• Capture is slow on Mac, and sometimes doesn’t work.
• QuickTime updates regularly hose the whole setup.
• Important QuickTime features aren’t supported.
• Playback is slow.
• Playback often crashes.
• Things just don’t work, and you don’t know why.

Now, granted, for simple sketches and experimentation, the library often will work. Or at least, it works except when it doesn’t — and you can read about how often it doesn’t in the reference.

Fortunately, I think the situation could be — and soon will be — very, very different.