As a member of “society” (you can loosely call it that), sometimes you feel the need to help others. Sadly, that usually comes at the price of doing something vaguely boring, disgusting or degrading in order to help (for example sponge baths, as in you washing someone with a sponge and water, not you getting bathed).

Folding@Home is one way of “helping”, but really it isn’t if you only run it on your home machine and maybe your PS3. You need to use multiple machines, or if you are adventurous, a server farm. That is one large step in the right direction, but you can always go one further…

Overclock.net forumgoer “nitteo” has decided to go down the road of graphical prowess. Using a large number of graphics cards, a few motherboards and one control station, nitteo is capable of over 260,000 points of work in 24 hours. That is a lot, when many people have trouble getting into just 4 figures.

Although it’s great for the fight against things like Cancer, the real question is: Will it run Rage?

[Via Bit-Tech]

A nice bit of news for once from the world of graphics cards and hefty expense…

Despite the fact that no-one you know bought a PhysX card, if you’re a PC gamer with a relatively recent NVIDIA card, you’ve already got one. Or, at least, you will soon. Spooks.

[From NVIDIA, CUDA and PhysX Article // PC /// Eurogamer]

If you have something like a GeForce 8800 or higher, you will be getting much better ragdolls in your games, as a portion of your graphics card’s… err… graphical processing… can be given over to running physics simulations. We’re probably going to lose a bit of graphical oomph (a tiny bit, not a huge chunk) but at least we will see things happening on screen more realistically, gravity-wise.

The same article from Eurogamer also notes that when you upgrade your card, you could potentially (if you have a motherboard that can do it, anyway) dedicate your old card to physics stuff and your new card to just visuals. Fantastic, although the people I hand my old video cards down to will not be happy…