SEG ASIA 2009—BEIJING, CHINA—APRIL 29, 2009— NVIDIA Corporation and GeoStar, a leading Chinese geophysical services provider, unveiled today the launch of a new hardware and software solution that will transform seismic computation for oil and gas companies in China.

Leveraging the processing power of NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs, GeoStar’s seismic software suite dramatically accelerates the performance of complex seismic data. Now, the computation of large datasets generated by searching the earth for oil deposits, can be achieved in smaller, more power efficient GPU based systems as compared to CPU-only based clusters.

“We are dealing with large prestack time migration datasets, which typically take more than 30 hours to run on a cluster of 66 CPUs,” said Liu Qin, general manager of GeoStar. “Just a single Tesla C1060 GPU delivers roughly the same computing power, which means we can get orders of magnitude performance increases as we add more GPUs, while dramatically saving power and cost. Tesla GPUs are truly a revolutionary solution for oil and gas exploration.”

The Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has spent recent months testing NVIDIA Tesla GPUs with GeoStar’s solution. In a computation of prestack time migration data covering 740 square kilometers, 24 Tesla GPUs completed the processing more than 600 times* faster than a traditional cluster with 66 CPUs, a result which CAS researchers believe can be improved through additional tuning.

Based on NVIDIA's massively parallel CUDA architecture, NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing solutions are transforming a broad selection of industries but their impact has been profound in the oil and gas space. As computational needs increase, the power consumption required to run and cool servers in datacenters have become a major portion of operational expenses. Tesla GPU-based clusters enable much higher performance than CPU-only clusters, meaning oil and gas companies can now deploy smaller, more computationally dense clusters that use less energy and still meet the ever increasing demand of applications such as seismic processing.

For more information on NVIDIA Tesla GPU Computing products, please visit www.nvidia.com/tesla and for more information on GeoStar’s software solution for the oil and gas space, please visit: www.geostar.net.cn.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce® graphics products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro® graphics products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ computing solutions products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, features, impact, and capabilities of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and CUDA architecture; are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; adoption of the CPU for parallel processing; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems; as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-K for the fiscal period ended January 25, 2009. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

# # #

© 2009 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, Tesla, CUDA, GeForce, and Quadro are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

*Work was completed in 33,307 hours on a cluster of 66 CPUs and in 54 hours using a cluster of six Tesla GPUs teamed with six CPUs.