Nvidia Releases CUDA Developer Drivers Version 285.86

Today brings good, fresh news for all the graphic developers using the Nvidia platform: the 285.86 CUDA Developer Driver.

The new driver version comes with a lot of improvements and new features among which we sould mention the new LLVM-based CUDA compiler, a whopping 1000+ new image processing functions and the redesigned Visual Profiler, now boasting "automated performance analysis and integrated expert guidance", as Nvidia themselves declare.

Compiling performance is said to raise by up to 10% when using the new LLVM tool with most applications, while the GPU-Accelerated Libraries come with support for Bessel functions in the CUDA standard Math library.

The new cuSPARSE tri-diagonal solver can become up to ten times faster on a 6-core CPU than the MKL, while the sparse matrix vector multiplying using ELL hybrid format is said to be twice as fast.

Some developer tools have also been improved and redesigned and new SDK code samples are now available in the new CUDA Toolkit 4.1. The CUDA Developer Driver 285.86 is available for Windows XP, Vista and 7, both 32 and 64-bit editions; nevertheless, MAC OS and Linux developers haven't been forgotten, as specific releases for the said operating systems are also available.