BitFlow partners with NVIDIA to bring GPUDirect for Video Technology to its frame grabbers

BitFlow has announced a partnership with NVIDIA to co-develop a new software extension that fully leverages NVIDIA GPUDirect for Video (DVP) technology—which allows third-party hardware to communicate directly with NVIDIA GPUs—with BitFlow’s Cyton, Alta, Neon, Karbon, and Axion frame grabbers.

The result of the collaboration, BitFlow’s Direct-for-Video Protocol (BFDVP), is a deep wrapper of NVIDIA DVP that enables the simple integration of the BitFlow Buffer Interface acquisition API (BiAPI) with NVIDIA GPUs. The BFDVP achieves zero CPU use, real-time video imaging by eliminating the delay in getting video into and out of NVIDIA GPUs, which is caused by the need to use the CPU to copy images from the frame grabber buffers to GPU buffers.

"BFDVP enables BitFlow frame grabbers to communicate directly and openly with NVIDIA GPUs, meaning that issues of CPU usage and latencies are eliminated and real-time imaging is now a reality," said Donal Waide, Director of Sales for BitFlow, Inc. "Vision system developers are now able to harness the graphics and image processing power of NVIDIA GPUs without the long latencies, often as high as ten frames, previously associated when integrated with third-party frame grabbers."

NVIDA DVP requires complex programming and proprietary libraries integrate with an application, but with the streamlined BFDVP, users can focus more readily on the two most important features of a frame grabber-GPU processing system: acquisition and processing.

"BFDVP minimizes CPU overhead because it handles the bulk of the management of the data transfer between the devices," said Waide. "BFDVP fully synchronizes transfers so it does away with the waste cycles of copying data between device driver buffers and lets BitFlow frame grabbers stream video to and from the NVIDIA GPU at sub-frame transfer times."

View more information onNVIDIA GPUDirect for Video.

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