Developer Newsletter: Issue #11

The cinematic computing revolution continues with the introduction of the most powerful members of the NVIDIA® GeForce FX family: the GeForce FX 5900 graphics processing units (GPUs). Architected for blazing speeds and delivering unmatched visual quality, the GeForce FX 5900 GPUs ignite PC gaming. The second-generation Intellisample high-resolution compression technology (HCT) delivers the highest-quality antialiasing for ultra-realistic visuals with no jagged edges. And, powered by the second-generation NVIDIA CineFX™ 2.0 engine with the industry's only true 128-bit precision processing--the GeForce FX 5900 GPUs take cinematic-quality special effects to new levels while providing the industry's most compatible and reliable gaming platform.

We also made a number of other announcements at E3:

• NVIDIA Debuts New Web Site for Enthusiasts
• NVIDIA and Eidos Interactive Team Up to Showcase PC Games at E3
• NVIDIA Gets "Abducted" at E3
• NVIDIA Corporation Named 2003 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year
• NVIDIA GPU Featured in Revolutionary New Area-51m Mobile Gaming Machine
• NVIDIA GeForce FX Is the Graphics Processor of Choice at E3
• NVIDIA Extends Technology Leadership with New NVIDIA nForce2 400 Processors

The Maya Cg Plug-in (along with the Cg compiler) provides the basic tools needed for the use of CgFX-based real-time shading in Maya 4.5. The Mel Tools for CgFX is an additional collection of tools, written in Mel, that can make life easier and more-productive for animators, modelers, and shader developers. The collection includes tools to manage, edit, automatically create, and control Cg shaders for real-time display in Maya 4.5.

Many universities have been using GPUs and Cg for courses, student projects, and research papers. If you're interested in joining institutions such as Stanford, Brown, Caltech, MIT, UNC, Cornell, and many others around the world by developing cutting-edge courseware using GPUs and Cg, please let us know by sending mail to teaching@nvidia.com. We would love to hear from you. In addition, you may want to take a look at The Cg Tutorial book and the various resources that complement it. 

Established by NVIDIA Corporation, the NVIDIA U conference aims to promote the advancement of graphics technology through industry and academic collaboration. San Diego will be home to NVIDIA U 2003, and is strategically scheduled from July 23rd through 25th immediately prior to Graphics Hardware 2003 and SIGGRAPH 2003. NVIDIA Corporation will host all conference fees and meals throughout the three day conference for all official attendees. All participants are responsible for all hotel and incidental costs. NVIDIA U is an NDA-only event and participants will be selected based on research relevance and space availability. Each participant must complete an application to be considered for NVIDIA U.

The Alias|Wavefront Maya 4.5 Cg Plug-in has been updated with a new feature that allows file references to be kept as relative paths from the project path. This allows greater ease of use when moving Maya content from one machine to another. Full source code is also bundled with the package. The latest build also fixes some mipmap generation and cube map flipping issues.

Industrial Light & Magic recently released a plug-in that allows Adobe Photoshop to work directly with OpenEXR images. The plug-in is available for Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and Microsoft Windows. The OpenEXR file format uses the same 16-bit floating-point "half" data type supported by the GeForce FX family, and is fully hardware-accelerated on these GPUs.

The source code for the plug-in is not yet available at the above site, but has been checked into the CVS repository. Developers wishing to build the plug-in, or just examine how it works, should follow the directions posted here.

The discreet 3ds max Cg Plug-in and the standalone CgFX Viewer have both been updated with new features, such as scripting support, and also a heavy focus on bug fixes and stability. 

More importantly, full source code is available to these key tools giving developers a clear, comprehensive example of how to integrate support for .fx files in their pipeline. Please see the Readme.txt file in the installers for more detail.

Our OpenGL Extensions Specifications page has been updated with the latest versions of several extensions, including:

• ARB_fragment_program
• ARB_vertex_buffer_object
• ARB_vertex_program
• IBM_rasterpos_clip
• NV_float_buffer
• NV_fragment_program
• NV_point_sprite
• NV_register_combiners2
• NV_vertex_program2

The latest Cg Labs include two tutorials: "Diffuse and Specular Lighting" and "Chromatic Dispersion."  In addition, there is a "Generic" exercise that allows you to experiment freely with a variety of vertex and fragment programs.

Each tutorial comes with a PowerPoint presentation that gives step-by-step instructions, and solution code.  The tutorials are set up to allow you to focus on the Cg effects that you're trying to achieve, so they are a great way to learn Cg as well as to teach it.  The framework that we have provided can be modified and extended to create other tutorials.

In addition, we are pleased to be releasing a build of the labs for the Linux platform.

The software that accompanies The Cg Tutorial book has been updated with new features (such as saving and loading configurations) as well as bug fixes.

In addition, we are pleased to be releasing a build of the framework for the Linux platform.

The NVIDIA Detonator FX drivers deliver significant performance increases and improved image quality, and provide a robust suite of software applications designed to extend and enhance the visual computing experience. Detonator FX provides significant increases in 3D graphics performance in real-world gaming benchmarks, and works with the entire line of NVIDIA GPUs—from the brand new GeForce FX GPUs, all the way back to the five-year-old TNT GPUs.

The NVIDIA Detonator FX drivers are free of charge, and available for download at http://www.nvidia.com/drivers.

To help serve you better, we would like to periodically ask for your input to help us focus our efforts on the areas that are of most interest and relevance to you and your work.

If you have a few moments, please visit our survey page, where you can answer five short questions about the topics and structure for the lab sessions we will be giving at SIGGRAPH.

Take advantage of our collection of DXTC Texture Tools to simplify your life when dealing with texture manipulation. Here are some tips to help you as you use the compression plug-in, library, and standalone nvDXT.exe:

• If your texture is mostly grey scale, select the Grey Scale button. Compression favors the green color more than red and blue. Selecting this option weights all the color channels equally.
• Dithering can improve the look of many textures when using compression.
• Gamma space filtering can improve your mipmaps. This creates mipmaps that take gamma correction into account so your mipmaps look better. In the MIP Map Generation (Filter) area, select Kaiser (Gamma Space). Please note that this filter may take a while to run on large textures.
• After mipmaps have been generated, you can apply a sharpening filter to reduce the amount of blurriness in your mipmaps. In the Sharpen After Filtering area, select Sharpen. Press Sharpen Settings to change the sharpening parameters.
  • Edge Radius. Width of edge detection.
  • Lambda. Strength of sharpening.
  • Clamping Value. Values that stop texels from drifting. Keep this greater than zero.
  • Theta. Used in anisotropic filtering. Blend value from source to destination image.
  • Non-Maximal Suppression. Add clamping to filter.
  • Two Components. Create two images and process them.
  • Anisotropic. Alternate version of warp sharp.
  • SharpBlur. Used in anisotropic filtering. Sharpen the warped image.
• The sharpening filter is described in the paper Enhancement by Image-Dependent Warping, by Nur Arad and Craig Gotsman.

The most popular pages and downloads over the past few weeks have been:

• Everythingzip. All our major downloads (NVSDK, Cg Toolkit, Cg Plug-ins, and documentation) in one convenient package. 
  
• DXTC Texture Tools. A collection of texture manipulation tools for manipulating DDS files, creating normal maps, working with compressed textures, and more.
  
• Fog Polygon Volumes. This Direct3D demo renders ordinary polygon objects as thick volumes of material. It will work on hardware that supports Direct3D Pixel Shaders version 1.3 or higher and has dedicated ps.1.3 and ps.2.0 paths. See the included readme.txt and code comments for more information.
  
• Presentations. Presentations from GDC 2003.
  
• Learn About Cg. A collection of whitepapers, technical briefs, FAQs, and presentations about Cg.
  
• Transmogrifying Textures. A collection of over 200 high-resolution, general-purpose, tiling, production-ready, real-time texture maps.
  
• Mel Tools for CgFX. A collection of tools to manage, edit, automatically create, and control Cg shaders for real-time display in Maya 4.5.