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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)
Pingpongstylize128
Vlad
Alexandrov

PingPongStylize
Azu128
Miguel
Portela
de Sousa

Azulejo
Blaze128
Mayuran
Thurairatnam

Blaze
Poststylize128
Vlad
Alexandrov

PostStylize
Single Shader Effect
First Second Third (Tie)
Shenyuan128
Shen
Yuan

Dynamic
Self
Light Map
Pdm128
Hyunwoo
Ki

Pyramid
Displacement
Mapping
Liquidmetal128
Ksystof
Narkovic

Liquid
Metal
Electricskin128
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.


Nov 12, 2007 | Direct link

  • FX Composer 2: Shader Authoring for Everyone
  • Perfkit 5: Optimize Your Application in Real-Time
  • Advanced Skin Rendering
  • Smoke, Fire and Water with Fluid Dynamics
  • Playable Universal Capture
  • Real-Time Voxelization of Triangle Meshes on the GPU
  • Stencil Routed A-Buffer

Go to our SIGGRAPH 2007 page


Aug 23, 2007 | Direct link

The August 2007 release of Cg 1.5 focuses on performance improvements, particularly for CgFX.

Download it on the Cg Toolkit page


Aug 23, 2007 | Direct link


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.


Jul 31, 2007 | Direct link


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


Jul 19, 2007 | Direct link


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.

Lightning Sample
SDK 10
Tools Page


Jul 17, 2007 | Direct link

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.


Jul 17, 2007 | Direct link


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.


Jun 28, 2007 | Direct link

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.

More on the FX Composer 2 page.


Jun 14, 2007 | Direct link

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.


Jun 11, 2007 | Direct link

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


Mar 22, 2007 | Direct link

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" »


Mar 6, 2007 | Direct link

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.

Read the full CSAA white paper


Jan 3, 2007 | Direct link

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.

Link to the guidelines


Oct 18, 2006 | Direct link

• State of the Art Cross-Platform Shader Development with FX Composer 2
[pdf in English, Japanese]

• Introduction to DX10
[pdf in English, Japanese]

• DX10 Performance and usage considerations
[pdf in English, Japanese]

• Physics Simulation on NVIDIA GPUs
[pdf in English, Japanese]

For more details, go to our CEDEC 2006 page.


Oct 17, 2006 | Direct link


SIGGRAPH 2006

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)

More details on our SIGGRAPH 2006 page.

Develop 2006

Shaders: The Sky is the Limit
Optimize Your GPU with the Latest NVIDIA Performance Tools
Next Generation Games with Direct3D10

More details on our Develop 2006 page.


Oct 17, 2006 | Direct link

siggraph_logo_234x175.jpg

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.

For more details, go to our SIGGRAPH 2006 page.


Oct 17, 2006 | Direct link

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)

Visit our Develop 2006 page for more details.


Oct 17, 2006 | Direct link

Frame_Profiler_250.jpg
NVPerfHUD 4's New Frame Profiler
 
NVPerfSDK's Sample Application

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
    • Automatically installed by NVPerfKit installer
  • NVPerfHUD 4
    • Advanced real-time analysis of Direct3D applications
  • NVPerfSDK
    • NVPerfAPI for accessing GPU signals in your applications
    • Sample code and helper classes for OpenGL(tm) and DirectX(tm) applications
    • NVIDIA Developer Control Panel and instrumented driver
  • NVIDIA Plug-in for Microsoft PIX for Windows
  • GLExpert
    • Debug OpenGL usage errors and performance issues
  • Support for PerfMon, Intel(r) VTune(tm), gDEBugger, and other analysis tools
  • gDEBugger 30-day trial version

Also, don't miss out on NVPerfKit and NVPerfHUD reviews by iXBT (in English and Russian) and GameDev.net.


Oct 17, 2006 | Direct link

cg.jpgCg 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.

Download it on the Cg 1.5 Beta 2 page.


Oct 17, 2006 | Direct link

cg.jpgCg 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.

Download it on the Cg 1.5 Beta 1 page.

Related Links
Cg Home Page
Cg Toolkit 1.4.1


Oct 17, 2006 | Direct link

Our GDC Presentations are now available in Acrobat and PowerPoint formats.
Visit our GDC 2006 Presentations page and start improving your applications today.

Quick links
Mobile Performance Tools and GPU Performance Tuning
OpenGL ES Content Development Post-Mortem on NVIDIA GPUs
Cross-Platform Development Using FX Composer 2.0
GPU Performance Tuning with NVIDIA Performance Tools
Physics Simulation on NVIDIA GPUs
Variance Shadow Maps
OpenGL SLI and NVX_instanced_arrays
OpenGL Performance Tools
OpenGL GPGPU
DX10: Prepping your Engine for a Smooth Start
DX10: Batching and Performance Considerations
DX10: Practical Metaballs and Implicit surfaces
Khronos: Creating the Embedded Media Processing Ecosystem
When Shaders and Textures Collide
Best Practices for Multi-Threading


Oct 17, 2006 | Direct link

nvidia tools