Windows developers may start tapping into the GPU to get a big boost in their application performance, with Nvidia's Parallel Nsight 1.0 Standard.

The NVIDIA Parallel Nsight 1.0 Standard is the industry?s first development environment for GPU-accelerated applications that work with Microsoft Visual Studio. Parallel Nsight has been in beta since January.

The Parallel Nsight 1.0 Standard is ready for download today here and is available to all Visual Studio developers free of charge.

Parallel Nsight has great functionality, such as allowing developers to debug CUDA C/C++, or DirectCompute applications on the GPU using the same familiar tools and techniques as on the CPU. Parallel Nsight is also the premier environment for graphics development, delivering the DirectX 11 tools required by graphics developers to develop game titles and visual computing applications.

NVIDIA has also today released CUDA Toolkit 3.1, an update to its CUDA software development kit (SDK), available here.