GPU Viewer offers graphics promise for tomorrow

SADLY FOR THE STATE of the software industry, yours truly isn't often impressed by the applications that bring something new to the market. And when that happens, those products usually do not come from tier one vendors, but rather indies that work hard to survive and create a innovative product as a hobby.

One of these very bright products is GPU Viewer, small application that uses the strength of either a multi-core CPU system, or harness the power of massive parallel units to do a visual search of the images.

Forget about sorting out pictures by name, this program sorts pictures by the date and time taken, and shows them in a visual way. You can't see fast previews of the pictures you took, but see continuous enhancement of picture quality, from a preview being only couple of pixels wide, to a full blown, 1:1 sized picture - all done almost simultaneously, courtesy of the processing power featured on graphics chips of today.

Opening your picture folder will sort all of the pictures by date taken...

If you want to try out something new, a new way how to look at your pictures, use our complementary L'INQ and download the application. On a notebook or a desktop with integrated graphics, this might be a painful experience, but if there is one application that could push discrete graphics into the domain of businesses such as stock photography and changing way private users see their photos, this is a ticket to ride.

Zooming the particular date opens all of the pictures taken on that da y, and the zoom goes up to 1:1 picture size, regardless of it being 1.2 or 10 MPixels...

The only requirements for the application is a graphics card with Shader Model 2.0. We have tried this application with GeForce 7300GT, 8500GT to monsters such as Radeon 2900XT and GeForce 8800 GTX, with only real difference being the speed that preview was sharpening the pictures. This is also a very CPU intensive app, and you can see the difference between dual core, quad core and eight core systems.

Now, the only thing missing here is who is going to hire this guy. Given the fact that we are aware of a similar concept being planned for something called Vienna, we would not be surprised if Mr. Jerome Muffat would trade France for USA. µ

L'INQ
gpuViewer homepage
gpuViewer download
gpuViewer user guide (RTFM)