Need more information from GDC? Or maybe you were unable to attend? Your moment has come! PDF versions of NVIDIA's GDC 2008 Sessions are now becoming available. Just click!
This slide set lists all the recent and upcoming updates to various NVIDIA developer tools around the GDC 2008 time frame. It covers software products such as PerfHUD 6.0, FX Composer 2.5, the NVIDIA Shader Debugger, our SDKs, and much more.
NVIDIA Developer Toolkit Overview (GDC 2008)
Thanks to all the developers who visited the NVIDIA Exhibition Suite and the various NVIDIA Sessions at GDC 2008. We were happy to have some standing-room-only attendance!
For those who were unable to visit San Francisco this year -- watch this space! Web-friendly versions of our GDC presentations will be available in the coming days.
With GDC 2008 Expo opening today, be sure to visit the AGEIA PhysX booth (West Hall Meeting Rooms 15 & 16),
and learn about how NVIDIA and AGEIA will take physics on a GPU to new levels.
AGEIA's PhysX software is widely adopted with more than 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on Sony Playstation3, Microsoft XBOX 360, Nintendo Wii, and gaming PCs. By combining AGEIA’s powerful PhysX technology with NVIDIA’s industry-leading GPU architectures, we will ensure that gamers and developers alike take advantage of the most compelling physics on the market.
As these new engineering developments expand the market and possibilities for great in-game physics driven by GPU computation, we will also continue to support CPUs in keeping with the heterogeneous hardware/software model already pioneered by PhysX. Existing PhysX developers can continue to develop as before, and the PhysX SDK binaries still remain free to PC developers.
Physics is one of the next great opportunities for gaming innovation. It is a substantial and visceral differentiator for game developers and a tremendous improvement to the gaming experience. The combination of NVIDIA and AGEIA technologies will deliver that next-generation experience.
Besides NVIDIA's own presence at "Expo Suite 658," be sure to visit these partners who are showing NVIDIA technology in action in their own booths:
- AGEIA - Now Available in Green - West Hall MR 15 and 16
- ALLEGORITHMIC - North Hall, 6533
- AUTODESK - North Hall, 5939
- EMERGENT GAME TECHNOLOGIES - North Hall, 5716
- HAVOK - West Hall, ES 162
- HEWLETT PACKARD - North Hall, 6220
- EIDOS - West Hall, 430 CP
- TEXAS INSTRUMENTS DLP-TV - St Regis Hotel, Meeting Suite
To Book Meeting: (213)814-1164
- Valve - West Hall, ES 362
- Zalman - North Hall, 6706
Be sure to keep an eye on NVIDIA's GDC 2008 Developer Page for the latest updates.
NVIDIA's Miguel Sainz will be giving a talk and demo of new real-time ambient occlusion methods, on Friday afternoon at this year's GDC. These methods are exciting because they can be layered onto almost any existing 3D pipeline. His talk has been added to our GDC 2008 Page.
Here is the description from the official GDC Conference Page:
Ambient occlusion is a lighting technique commonly used in offline rendering. It essentially computes the soft shadows cast by a light of uniform intensity, such as the sky on a cloudy day. It gives perceptual clues of depth, curvature, and proximity and thus is important for realistic rendering. Rendering ambient occlusion can be done in real-time as a post-processing effect based on a depth buffer from the eye's point of view. This lecture does a review of multiple depth-buffer-based ambient occlusion techniques. Three of the described algorithms are ray-marching in the depth buffer, an algorithm based on accumulating solid angles, and a new hybrid method called tangent tracing. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm, and includes real-time demos.
The latest version of NVIDIA CUDA now supports Apple Macintosh OS X 10.5 ("Leopard"). Have a an NVIDIA-powered recent Mac? See "High Peformance Computing for the Rest of Us" today! Details on the CUDA 1.1 release can be found here at the CUDA Zone.
Just in time for GDC 2008, we've updated NVIDIA's accelerated and Open Source Texture Tools 2.
This update of Texture Tools 2 includes important improvements:
High quality filtering for mipmap generation and image resizing.
Added support for DXT1a format, and improved support for RGB and BC5 formats.
Improved documentation
And of course a handful of fixes to improve function & performance
Link to the public changelog for more details.
Going to GDC 2008 in San Francisco? So are we! NVIDIA will be presenting on an array of GPU-related topics at the conference.
We're also showcasing the latest releases of many of our most popular and powerful developer tools so that you can come away from the conference knowing that you have the best and freshest info from NVIDIA.
Our booth location this year is number "ES 658." Don't just read about it on Slashdot, come on by to get the real inside scoop on the latest news from NVIDIA.
This whitepaper explains how to easily integrate an efficient method for creating realistic soft shadows on DirectX 10 and high-end DirectX 9 GPUs. The image below shows our technique implemented in the recently released game Hellgate: London, developed by Flagship Studios. Each character's shadow varies in softness depending on the character's relationship with the ground.
Image used with permission from Flagship Studios
