Nvidia has released a free edition of its Parallel Nsight tool that works with Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) flagship Visual Studio 2008 SP1 professional. Parallel Nsight is a GPU-accelerated application development tool that lets developers tap into the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs, spreading the workload across both CPUs and GPUs.

Releasing a free version is a clear step to sell it to more developers, and Sanford Russell, general manager of GPU Computing at Nvidia affirmed the company's commitment to bring GPU computing to the masses. He was quoted as saying: "We've got feature enhancements lined up for two years. The first big step was integration with Visual Studio."

According to Nvidia, support for Visual Studio 2010 will be arriving later this year.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at PCMag

Related Articles:
Time to move on from Moore's Law, says Nvidia's chief scientist
NVIDIA Fermi GPU eyes supercomputing arena
Nvidia inks SLI deal with Intel for new Intel processors