It's with pleasure that we announce the winners of the "Shade Your World" competition sponsored by NVIDIA,GameDev.net, and Softimage.
Full Screen Effects
First
Second
Third (Tie)
Vlad Alexandrov PingPongStylize
Miguel Portela de Sousa Azulejo
Mayuran Thurairatnam Blaze
Vlad Alexandrov PostStylize
Single Shader Effect
First
Second
Third (Tie)
Shen Yuan Dynamic Self Light Map
Hyunwoo Ki Pyramid Displacement Mapping
Ksystof Narkovic Liquid Metal
Rob Galankis Electric Skin
Yes, we had two third-prize ties, one in each category!
The first-prize winners in each category will receive a GeForce 8800 graphics card. The second-prize winners will each receive copies of Softimage XSI Foundation. Our third-prize winners will each receive a copy of the new book GPU Gems 3.
It was especially gratifying to see entries come in from all around the globe: the seven different winners represent as many different countries. Congratulations to all!
The winning shaders and some terrific runners-up will soon be available for your own experimentation in FX Composer 2, via the NVIDIA Shader Library. Until then, please join NVIDIA, GameDev.Net, and Softimage in congratulating the contest winners on our Developer Forums.
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.
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
The sample shows how to simulate and animate different kinds of lighting effects using DirectX10 features. The structure of a lightning beam is created by using fractal subdivision of line segments, efficiently implemented using geometry shaders and stream out. A geometry shader is then used to create camera facing billboards with a procedurally created color gradient. The atmospheric glow effect is implemented by downsampling and blurring the rendered bolts of lighting using a Gaussian filter kernel with separate extinction coefficients per color channel in order to fake atmospheric scattering.
We are delighted to finally share our first public beta of FX Composer 2 with you.
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.
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)
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.
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.
CSAA produces antialiased images that rival the quality of 8x or 16x MSAA, while introducing only a minimal performance hit over standard (typically 4x) MSAA. It works by introducing the concept of a new sample type: a sample that represents coverage. This differs from previous AA techniques where coverage was always inherently tied to another sample type. In supersampling for example, each sample represents shaded color, stored color/z/stencil, and coverage, which essentially amounts to rendering to an oversized buffer and downfiltering. MSAA reduces the shader overhead of this operation by decoupling shaded samples from stored color and coverage; this allows applications using antialiasing to operate with fewer shaded samples while maintaining the same quality color/z/stencil and coverage sampling. CSAA further optimizes this process by decoupling coverage from color/z/stencil, thus reducing bandwidth and storage costs.
Following the success of GPU Gems and GPU Gems 2, NVIDIA has decided to produce a third GPU Gems volume to showcase the best new ideas and techniques for the latest programmable GPUs.
If you would like to contribute to the GPU Gems series, please read the submission guidelines. The deadline for proposal submissions is Monday, December 11, 2006. If your proposal is accepted, you will receive additional time to complete the chapter.
Real-time graphics is going to leap forward again. API are becoming more flexible than ever before allowing a new class of effects and improved developer tools increase performance and productivity on many platforms, including Linux. We invite you to attend the following tutorials:
• Next Generation Programmability in OpenGL • Physics on NVIDIA GPUs • State of the Art Cross Platform Shader Development • Next Generation Effects in DirectX10 • Optimize Your GPU with the Latest NVIDIA Performance Tools (including Linux Performance Tools)
At the end of each session a high-end NVIDIA graphics card will be given away. To participate, swipe your badge at the entrance and get a raffle ticket.
NVIDIA Engineers will demonstrate tools to improve shading quality and graphics performance on current projects. They will also talk about what you should absolutely know for your next Direct3D10 title. Do not miss these sessions at the Develop Conference held in Brighton, UK.
• Shaders: The Sky is the Limit. NVIDIA and Sony joint presentation (Thursday July 13th, from 11am - noon)
• Optimize Your GPU with the Latest NVIDIA Performance Tools (Thursday July 13th, from 1:30pm - 2:30pm)
• Next Generation Games with Direct3D10 (Thursday July 13th, from 3:00pm - 4:00pm)
We are proud to release NVPerfKit 2, a comprehensive suite of performance tools to help debug and profile OpenGL and Direct3D applications. NVPerfKit gives you access to low-level performance counters inside the driver and hardware counters inside the GPU itself. The counters can be used to determine exactly how your application is using the GPU, identify performance issues, and confirm that performance problems have been resolved.
A major new component in NVPerfKit 2 is NVPerfHUD 4. This latest version of our real-time performance analysis tool now features automated performance analysis, access to GPU performance counters, updated and improved performance graphs, and much more. In a recent survey, over 100 NVPerfHUD 4 users reported an average performance improvement of 34.8% by using NVPerfHUD 4 to tune their applications. These users also reported that NVPerfHUD 4 helped them find an average of 11 rendering bugs during development. (Results were obtained from individuals using a variety of system configurations and applications. Individual results may vary.)
NVPerfKit 2 consists of the following components:
Instrumented Driver
Interfaces with graphics API and GPU to provide performance counter data
Cg 1.5 Beta 2 went live today. In addition on new features provided by the Beta 1, it introduces support for Solaris, Universal (X86+PowerPC) binaries for Mac OS and general compatibility improvements. Code samples have also been added.
Cg 1.5 Beta 1 is available for download. This version of Cg features GLSL profiles for OpenGL and Shader Model 3 profiles for Direct3D. A procedural API for effect creation has also been added to support COLLADA. As always, this most recent version has been tuned for higher performance.
Our GDC Presentations are now available in Acrobat and PowerPoint formats. Visit our GDC 2006 Presentations page and start improving your applications today.
NVPerfSDK's Sample Application
Cg 1.5 Beta 2 went live today. In addition on new features provided by the Beta 1, it introduces support for Solaris, Universal (X86+PowerPC) binaries for Mac OS and general compatibility improvements. Code samples have also been added.
