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Last Updated:
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2002
Developer Newsletter: Issue #7In this month's issue:
Iron Developer Conference
NVIDIA's "Iron Developer" Seminar is taking place this week in Roppongi, Tokyo. You can still walk in if you want to attend. Co-hosted by Silicon Studio Corporation and sponsored by Microsoft, Softimage, AMD, and Elsa, this event is a must for game and real-time application developers. This year's conference will focus on:
- Cg - A high-level language for programming GPUs through DirectX 8, DirectX 9, and OpenGL
- Details on NVIDIA's next generation GPUs, including NV30 and the CineFX architecture
- Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 - the latest version of Microsoft's suite of multimedia application programming interfaces
- The latest real-time rendering technologies for cinematic shading, with advanced shadows, lighting, high precision and high dynamic range rendering, and more
- Softimage|XSI 3.0 - with Cg and real-time shader integration
- Performance optimization
- Hands-on coding labs
Find out more here.
artFutura Conference Talks
We'll be presenting two talks at the artFutura conference that will run from October 31 to November 3 in Barcelona, Spain:
Thursday, October 31
16:30 to 18:30 - Juan Guardado, NVIDIA Corporation
Convergence of Cinematic Technologies and Videogames
Friday, November 1
12:30 to 14:30 - Juan Guardado, NVIDIA Corporation
Programming Special Effects on Next Generation Hardware
Cg Shader Contest Results
The September CgShaders.org shader contest ended recently, and there were some stunning submissions. The two winners in the NV30 category will receive NV30-based boards, while the two winners in the General category will receive NV25-based boards. Check out the contest winners here.
That's not all! The October contest is now underway, and the stakes are still the same. Don’t miss your chance to win an NV30-equipped Shuttle XPC system or an NV30-based graphics board. Find out more at: http://www.cgshaders.org/contest/. The Shader Repository at CgShaders.org (at http://www.cgshaders.org/shaders/) offers a selection of shaders that you can use and learn from.
Cg Shader Repository
There are now over 35 shaders in the Cg Shader repository on CgShaders.org. You can freely use these as starting points or inspiration for your own work, as long as you credit the authors as described in the accompanying open-source license. For more about submitting and using shaders, click here.
NVIDIA Sponsored DCC Training Events
We're pleased to sponsor two great DCC events for developers. The first is the LightWave 7.5 Character Animation Training Tour, which will be running from October 31 to November 17 in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The second event will showcase the life cycle of creating a game using high-end tools, middleware and services that can help you focus on the code that matters. This will take place in Santa Monica, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Montreal, and Toronto on several dates in November. You can find more here.
Audio SDK Updated
We've updated our audio SDK, which now contains a ton of useful resources: documentation, demos, sample code, OpenAL information, and utilities. If you're interested in audio, be sure to check it out here.
Coding Tip
You may have heard that reading buffers (such as the color back-buffer or a render-target texture) is a bad idea if you want to get optimal performance. There are actually three problems.
First, reading back any buffer forces the driver to finish up the current list of rendering commands and to stall the graphics pipeline, preventing new commands from executing. This is necessary to ensure the buffer is in a consistent and valid state when it is returned to the application.
Second, reading the returned buffer requires that the data transfers from AGP to system-memory. The AGP-bus connecting these two types of memory is fast when data is flowing from system- to AGP-memory, but unfortunately much, much slower for transferring data the other way.
Third, and most significant, when the driver is waiting for the graphics pipeline to finish (see above), it idles the CPU! This is because the CPU has to wait to get the results of the read back before it can continue processing.
The bottom line is simple: look for ways to avoid read backs whenever possible -- perhaps by using render-to-texture or reworking your algorithms. In return, you'll get better performance.
Send Us Your Comments!
Please let us know how you like the restructured Developer website by sending mail to devrelfeedback@nvidia.com with the word COMMENTS in the subject line. If you have had any problem downloading our Cg Toolkits, please let us know as well. Other comments are also welcome, of course.
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