Fun with paint guns, but they take quite a while to get on with it. The key points take a few seconds, and even they aren't very illuminating, just fun:

One paint gun is slow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGf0HaW7x4#t=2m53s

Painting with many guns simultaneously: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGf0HaW7x4#t=8m12s

Slow mo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGf0HaW7x4#t=9m02s

The slow motion shot looks incredible

Advertisement-like: Yes, but also contradicting high resolution graphics by creating a Mona Lisa that looked like an 8-bit game avatar.

Impressed with the effort to build it: Yes, but I think nVidia has a large budget for such pursuits.

Parallel performance shown: Yes, but without making analogies between the giant gun and GPU clear (more titillation than articulation).

Insight into parallel performance: No

Oversimplified: Yes

cma posting this link http://i.imgur.com/TvOip.jpg was cool, and this brought to my attention that although the video may not have sparked any insights, it could provoke the HN community to bring insight into the topic. The video also caused me to try and imagine something more insightful. The slow motion shot could technically be considered "insightful" since in real motion we could not see what the slow motion gave us access into seeing, therefore this could be called "in-sight-ful," no?

This also made me recall an invention I thought of for fun...a wall climbing robot (vacuum?) that has a schematic of the dimensions of the building it is climbing in its bot-brain along with a graphic it is to spray and it goes to work until finished as if the building was paper and the bot a printer.

In a community like this, a cool/fun/entertaining piece of in-formation that may not provide great insight but can be enough to spark creative powers regardless.

Maybe not 100% of the time, but in this case, for me, I think it provided something and provoked me to want to share my first post at HN. Thank you :)

This is oversimplified. The whole demonstration plays like an advertisement.

That's because it is one. Of a sort, at least. It was a product/platform conference presentation, and what you were seeing was the C-level summary keynote (and an adrenaline generator for the devs attending the conference).

Which is hardly a surprise because the Mythbusters are originally special effects guys who worked on their fair share of ads.

That was quite gimmicky.

The Redditer in me perhaps is impressed, the Y is disappointed that it offers no real insight.

You are truly scalable person :)

reddit even linked to an analog today: http://i.imgur.com/TvOip.jpg

The robots were awesome but they kinda failed to demonstrate anything about cpus or gpus.

while it offers no true insight on CPU vs GPU, let's be real, that gun was feakin awesome.

I'm impressed by the fact that someone actually took the time to build that thing.

I think it's more a matter of funding, which a GPU manufacturer provided. That this was shown to a crowd of what looks like high schoolers, that's a bit morally dubious, in my opinion.

[2008]

The Mona Lisa looked a bit like Patrick Steward in a wig.

It's a shame they didn't build a parallel version of the robot, especially if it could 'render' an animated image.

Highlights parallelism performance in an entertaining way

Why did they disable comments under the video?

Because it's pretty obviously an advertisement with no real insight.

Still entertaining though.

Discussion under advertisement would have made that advertisement more efficient.

Myth: GPUs are not more awesome than CPUs

Status: Busted

Next up: Is the taste of Cheerios really unsinkable?