CUDA

CUDA is a parallel programming environment that runs on recent NVIDIA graphics cards and can be used to speed up certain computations. As a rule, newer, more expensive cards have more cores, faster and more powerful cores, and more memory. The more cores a card has, the more operations is can perform in parallel and thus the faster it runs. More memory makes it possible to process images all at once instead of breaking them down into pieces, and processing them one piece at a time.

To find out if your graphics card supports CUDA, use the Help/About Picture Window Pro command from the main menu. At the bottom of the dialog box is a line that indicates if CUDA is available or not.

This dialog box also indicates the number of threads you main processor supports. Whether you have CUDA or not, Picture Window uses the available threads to speed up operations since multiple threads can run simultaneously. In the case above, there are 8 threads since the program is running on an 4-core Intel Core i7 CPU which supports two threads per core.

If you have a graphics card you think should support CUDA and it does not show up as available, go to the NVIDIA web site (www.nvidia.com) download the latest driver for your graphics card.