Developer Newsletter: Issue #12

A SIGGRAPH 2003 paper entitled Cg: A system for programming graphics hardware in a C-like language (written by Bill Mark, Steve Glanville, Kurt Akeley, and Mark Kilgard) is now available. This systems paper discusses the language's design and implementation, and will be presented during the Computation on GPUs papers session at SIGGRAPH 2003 (Thursday, July 31 at 3:45 pm).

Don't miss a chance to try your hand at writing shaders and other real-time effects in Cg! This year, we will be hosting both Introductory and Advanced classes throughout SIGGRAPH 2003, right in the convention center (in Meeting Rooms 27A and 27B), for technical directors, programmers, and others interested in getting their fingers dirty with shader writing. The sessions are filling up quickly on a first-come-first-served basis, so reserve your spot now at http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?FO=FO_S2003_Cg_Signup!

For the second year in a row, NVIDIA will be sponsoring our Got Art? Get Quadro! drawing contest, open to all artists attending SIGGRAPH 2003. Ten artists will compete simultaneously in twenty-minute rounds. The winner of each round will walk away with a brand new graphics card courtesy of NVIDIA and PNY. Everybody who enters will win a free T-shirt just for trying. We start a new contest every half hour and the contests will run through the duration of the three-day exhibition. At the end of each day, we will also be giving away great software from Alias|Wavefront, Discreet, Kaydara, Newtek, Right Hemisphere, and Softimage. We've run this contest at GDC 2002, SIGGRAPH 2002, and GDC 2003, and it has proven to be a fun-filled event -- show up early to reserve your spot!

You can see last year's SIGGRAPH newsletter edition with a Got Art? Get Quadro! feature at http://www.nvidiacom/view.asp?IO=siggraph04.

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 500, available now, is armed with a high-end architecture featuring the industry’s only true 128-bit floating-point frame buffer, industry-leading 12 bits of sub-pixel precision, parallelized vertex engines, the industry’s first on-chip vertex cache, and fully programmable pixel pipelines allowing developers to simulate a virtually unlimited range of real-world properties like metal or skin and to modify them on the fly. Learn more at http://www.nvidiacom/view.asp?PAGE=quadrofx.

The NVIDIA Quadro FX Go700 is the ultimate mobile workstation graphics solution for DCC and CAD. Professionals in these markets can take advantage of the industry-first full 128-bit floating-point precision graphics pipeline, 128MB of unified frame buffer memory, and DirectX 9 shader functionality for the best mobile application experience. 

NVIDIA Quadro FX Go provides a full complement of desktop workstation features, including hardware-accelerated antialiased lines, OpenGL hardware overlay planes, and two-sided lighting. The industry’s first fully programmable mobile graphics solution features NVIDIA Intellisample technology, providing blistering fast antialiasing performance, and NVIDIA PowerMizer 3.0 technology, which incorporates a variety of power-saving techniques to maximize battery life.  

For more details, please visit www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=quadrofx_go.

DirectX 9 notebooks with GeForce FX Go Mobile GPUs are available now! Top notebook providers, including Toshiba, Sony, Acer, and Medion now offer:

• Performance Notebooks with the world's highest performance DirectX 9 Mobile GPU, the GeForce FX Go5600.
• Mainstream Notebooks with the world's ONLY mainstream DirectX 9 Mobile GPU, the GeForce FX Go5200.

To learn more, visit http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=fx_mobile. If you don't need DirectX 9 functionality but still want blazing fast speeds, try the GeForce4 4200 Go, which you can find in laptops such as Dell's Inspiron 8500 or Latitude D800.

We recently announced that NVIDIA Quadro FX hardware rendering capabilities are now fully exposed within SOFTIMAGE|XSI version 3.5. The integrated solution, which takes advantage of NVIDIA Quadro FX vertex and pixel shader programs in SOFTIMAGE|XSI’s render tree GUI, makes production rendering an integral part of real-time digital content creation. This capability enables 3D film, broadcast, and game developers to produce cutting-edge visuals within the constraints of increasingly tight deadlines.

For more details, please visit http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=IO_20030609_6068.

NVIDIA is proud to sponsor Microsoft's premiere DirectX 9 technical training event being held July 16 & 17th in Seattle. NVIDIA will be presenting technical talks to help you get the most out of DirectX 9 and HLSL, as well as hosting testing and meeting suites. We encourage you to attend and take advantage of early-bird registration at http://www.microsoft.com/corpevents/meltdown2003/home.asp. The event agenda is available at http://www.microsoft.com/corpevents/meltdown2003/agenda.asp.

Microsoft and NVIDIA are pleased to announce that you will receive a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra compliments of NVIDIA if you are one of the first 250 registrations received by Microsoft. Offer good only with Early Bird or Full Price registration until July 9, 2003, while supplies last. Other conditions apply.

We would be please to meet you at Microsoft's Tech Ed event, which takes place in Barcelona Spain from July 1st to July 4th, 2003. Visit the NVIDIA booth to see the latest in high-performance graphics hardware -- GeForce FX 5900 -- as well as the ultimate 64-bit computing platform, the nForce3 Pro.

For more, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/europe/teched/.

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.

We've just put up an up-to-date Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) list at http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=General_FAQ. The FAQ includes several sections: General, Performance, Texturing, Programmable Shading, and Cg. If you have questions that you'd like us to add, please let us know at http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?FO=FO_FAQ_Submissions. You can also use the submission form to send general comments and suggestions.

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.

Are you taking advantage of everything your GPU can do? Our nView multi-display technology provides a revolutionary way to multi-task and process information easier. Instead of stacking window upon window within the confines of a single display, imagine spreading your work across multiple displays. Financial analysts can have a monitor for tracking each data stream. Graphic artists can use an entire display for palettes, and another for editing. The possibilities are endless. 

nView is seamlessly integrated within the Microsoft Windows environment, helping users to maximize productivity though advanced desktop and application management. nView also provides increased efficiency on a single monitor by enabling multiple Windows desktops, quicker access to hidden windows with transparency and window rollups, and hotkeys for access to all nView functions. nView provides a quick and easy way for you to manage multiple Windows desktops, thereby increasing your efficiency and enabling you to see what you've been missing.

Learn more about how nView can help you at http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=feature_nview.

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.
  
• NVIDIA OpenGL Extension Specifications. This page contains all the NVIDIA OpenGL extension specifications available in one place - now with convenient online text view.
  
• Presentations. Presentations from GDC 2003.
  
• Learn About Cg. A collection of whitepapers, technical briefs, FAQs, and presentations about Cg.
  
• Cg Tutorial Examples. The latest version of the software that accompanies The Cg Tutorial is available here for both the Windows and Linux platforms.
  
• 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.