1100 Paintballs Shoot to instantly make a Picture

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Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters built a huge paintball gun that can shoot 1100 paintballs in an blink of an eye. When the balls crash on the canvas you can see a picture of the Mona Lisa. This was an attraction at an Nvidia event, I wonder how much the unit cost! I guess when you have a huge budget your mind can do wild.

Via: Hack a Day

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6 Comments


  1. I think they were trying to make a point about why gpus are good, but the video cuts off a bit early


  2. I think the demonstration is a bit off and really doesn’t connect in the real world. If this was accurate then they would basically be telling us that GPUs get loaded up for 30 minutes and then make one frame instantly, while CPUs run continually but make a frame only ever minute or two.

    I think nVidia has really just gone off the deep end, they claim that CPUs aren’t important anymore and that computers should just be a bunch of GPUs, but it doesn’t make sense, if anything the GPU will soon be combined into the CPU and cease to exist, especially when they are so expensive, and so unreliable (nVidia can thank itself for those two reasons). They don’t even keep up the transistor size compared to CPUs so they are more expensive, take more power, and run hotter then electronics of similar capacity.


  3. Moto:
    That would be Intel’s side of the argument and do it all on the CPU
    Nvidia’s point being, gpu’s are such pure and great number crunchers with direct ram access that they boast a “bigillion teraflops a nano second”. Their actual goal doesn’t seem to be to replace the cpu, but to do gaming directly on the card. Who needs to build a $2000 gaming rig every year when to play Crysis 5 on the highest settings you buy their high end “game card”

    As to the actual demonstration, very flawed but does represent the technology, gpus don’t calculate a pixel at time, they build scene and send a snap shot.


  4. Meaby it didnt show the point, but it was certainly very inpresive to see.And it tells the main point that a GPU is faster at graphics. GPUs are optimized for externally fast floating point calculations.They can do float math much faster than CPUs, also havening ram connected directly to the GPU also means much faster reading of textures from memory.

    So i donut think they will be ditching GPUs any time soon. Where computers needed graphics a GPU was always used because it could do the job much faster with less work. This goes back to the old retro video game consoles.What the first GPUs did it was assemble the small title map icons in to a picture and generate the video signal.This is a lot of work for a CPU because it has to move every icon pixel by pixel. A GPU can move the icons as whole and that drastically speeds up everything. Later these GPUs started offteing more features like scaling and rotation (This is agen time consuming to do with a CPU) Until eventually becoming 3D GPUs

    Now we just need games to switch to ray trace 3D rendering.Todays graphics cards are getting fast enough to do it in real time, if only there was support for this. (Could also reduce the wait time drastically when rendering high quality from 3D programs, you know how long that takes)



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