The "Amazing Creations" competition celebrates the very essence of the creativity that
defines digital art – the ability to create artistically and
technically excellent images of things that are impossible in the real
world. Digital artists don’t have any barriers to realizing their
wildest ideas. They can build whole virtual worlds and render them in a
way that makes them almost tangible and embodied with life.
This breakthrough competition runs from 7 January 2008. For more details, click here.
GameDev.net, in conjunction with NVIDIA and SoftImage, are celebrating the release of NVIDIA FX Composer 2 by asking you to get your shade on!
The challenge is simple: Use FX Composer 2 to create an amazing shader. Show us scenes that sparkle, surfaces that shock, materials that are out of this world – or maybe so close to it you can’t tell the difference. And while you’re at it, see if you can make it artist-friendly, too...
Your shader could win you a big prize, and it could be immortalized (with clear credit to you) in our Shader Library.
Shade Your World Contest
FX Composer 2 is a powerful integrated development environment for shader authoring. With support for DirectX and OpenGL, HLSL, COLLADA FX, and CgFX, as well as .fbx, .x, .3ds, .obj, and .dae formats, FX Composer provides true cross-platform functionality.
We strongly recommend that you read through the Quick Tutorial (linked from FX Composer's new Start Page), as well as the User Guide (also linked from FX Composer's Start Page) to get a good understanding of FX Composer's extensive capabilities. These include Shader Library integration, ShaderPerf analysis, animation support, COLLADA support, scripting, effect and project wizards, customizable toolbars and layouts, and much more.
More on the FX Composer 2 page.
This release candidate of FX Composer 2 includes various bug fixes and minor improvements, including better support for older Shader Model 2.0 GPUs. Please note that the shader templates generated by the shader authoring wizard use the ps_3_0 profile, but you can modify them to use ps_2_a if you have older hardware.
We encourage you to visit our public developer forums, where you can discuss FX Composer 2 with other users, as well as the development team. We look forward to seeing you there
This release includes a number of important improvements:
- 22% faster CUDA compressor (now 12.5x faster than the CPU implementation)
- Compiled/compatible with release NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 1.0
- Added support for input DDS files, including cube maps
- Added support for input PSD files
- Added nvdecompress tool
- Added nvimgdiff tool
- Added nvddsinfo tool
- DXT3 & DXT5 CUDA compressors
- Faster DXT5n CPU compressor
- Several bug fixes
Please visit our new developer forums to share and discuss any suggestions or problems you may have.
Texture Tools 2 Alpha page.
We are delighted to finally share our latest beta of FX Composer 2 with you. This release includes numerous better support for foreign languages, Vista x64 fixes, and bug fixes. Make sure to check out our new FX Composer 2 overview slide deck.
We are pleased to unveil the cover of the upcoming “GPU Gems 3” book. This image has been rendered in NVIDIA’s “Human Head” demo, which features Doug Jones, who recently starred as the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
The book will be in full color, hard cover, and will contain 41 chapters, including “Advanced Skin Rendering”, which explains how to render ultra-realistic characters. GPU Gems 3 will be released at SIGGRAPH 2007 but can already be pre-ordered.
We will release more information about this project as we get closer to SIGGRAPH.
Our GDC 2007 presentations are available for download:
NVIDIA FX Composer 2: A Comprehensive Shader Development Package
[download] Slides (PDF)
GPU Optimization with the Latest NVIDIA Performance Tools
[download] Slides (PDF)
GeForce 8800 OpenGL Extensions
[download] Slides (PPT)
NVIDIA Demo Team Secrets – Cascades
[download] Slides (.zip + movies)
NVIDIA Demo Team Secrets – Advanced Skin Rendering
[download] Slides (PDF)
Real-time volumetric smoke using D3D10
[download] Slides (PDF)
Soft shadows using hierarchical min-max shadow maps
[download] Slides (PDF)
How to make use of Direct3D10 now
[download] Slides (PDF)
GDC 2007 Page
We are pleased to demonstrate the latest version of our NVIDIA Developer Toolkit at GDC 2007, complete with six all-new software products for developers:
-
FX Composer 2. Featuring DirectX and OpenGL support via HLSL, Cg, and COLLADA FX, as well as powerful pipeline integration features for real production environments.
- Shader Library. The world's largest shader library.
- SDK 10. All-new code samples for DirectX and OpenGL.
- GPU-Accelerated Texture Tools. Now more than 10x faster with GPU acceleration via CUDA, and support for DirectX 10 texture formats.
- PerfHUD 5. Featuring powerful edit-and-continue for shaders and render states, customizable graphs, DirectX 10 and Vista support, and much more.
- ShaderPerf 2. Support for vertex and pixel shader analysis as well as Release 100 drivers.
We are showing off all these tools at GDC in booth # 5134 and at our various sessions. The Shader Library, SDK 10, GPU-Accelerated Texture Tools, and ShaderPerf 2 are now available for download. Betas of FX Composer 2 and PerfKit 5 will be available soon after GDC.
FX Composer 2
Continue reading "Six All-New Tools Showcased at GDC 2007" »
NVIDIA® Gelato® 2.1 Release Candidate 2 Available
A new version of the Gelato high-quality renderer is available for download from this page. Release candidate 2 has the latest features and bug fixes, notably:
- Support for Autodesk® Maya® 8.5
- Support for Autodesk® 3ds Max 9
- Support for Shave and a Haircut
- Significantly
faster raytracing than version 2.0 Gelato provides high-quality,
GPU-accelerated, non-real-time rendering using the NVIDIA Quadro® FX
and GeForce boards.
A final release of Gelato 2.1 is anticipated shortly.
Our texture tools (including our DXT libraries) are now available with support for both Visual Studio 2005 and 2003.
Visit the DDS Utilities page.
