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Last Updated:
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30
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2003
Developer Newsletter: Issue #14
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DEVELOPER RESOURCES |
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Take Our Developer Survey, Win a Quadro FX 3000!
Help us decide where to spend our time and energy on developer services! We want to hear from all you Programmers, Artists, Designers and Producers about the things NVIDIA can do to help you create awesome products.
Fill out our Developer Survey and tell us which services and tools you use most and what we can do to improve. Completed surveys will be entered in a drawing for a Quadro FX 3000 (MSRP $2995). We look forward to hearing from you!
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NVPerfHUD Updated and Available to Registered Developers
Special functionality is enabled in a combination of the latest NVIDIA drivers and the GeForce FX 5200 & GeForce FX 5900 GPUs, providing an overlay of two informative graphs on top of any Direct3D application. These graphs contain important statistics about your application, helping you to identify potential bottlenecks. The graphs display sampled data in the same way a heart rate monitor would, scrolling from right to left so you can see the values of the last 256 frames. If you are a registered developer, please download both an enabled driver, such as 45.28, and the latest NVPerfHUD Settings utility (v45.28.1.4 in NVPerfHUD.zip) to enable this feature.
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Wide-Screen Laptop Market Update
 Wide screen notebooks are taking off and expected to hit 10% of market by middle of next year, accounting for an estimated total of 36 million units. Several factors are driving this growth:
- panel vendors get better use of mother glass with wide aspect which drives lower cost
- wide panels have larger diagonal measure
- key selling aspect for end users
- wide panels support wide screen DVD playback better
- wide units support thinner notebooks since there is more room for peripherals that do not overlap the motherboard
NVIDIA recommends that you stay ahead of the curve by supporting the key wide-screen resolutions listed below, to make sure that your game gets played the way it's meant to be played on wide screens.
- WXGA - 1280x800 (70% of wide market)
- WSXGA - 1680x1050 (15% of wide market)
- WUXGA - 1900x1200 (15% of wide market)
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Cg Caustics on Gamasutra
Simulating and rendering realistic water is, like simulating fire, a fascinating task: it is not easy to achieve good results at interactive frame rates, and thus creative thinking must often be used. This article explains an aesthetics-driven method for rendering the underwater lighting effects known as "caustics" in real-time.
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EVENTS |
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NVIDIA is Sponsoring Discreet's Evolve Tour
NVIDIA is sponsoring Discreet's Evolve tour - showcasing 3ds max 6 and NVIDIA Quadro FX! Discreet and NVIDIA invite you to this free event with demonstrations given by Film, Games and Design industry experts. Register today - seats are limited. There will be special discounts on Discreet, IBM and NVIDIA/PNY Quadro FX products, as well as prize drawings at each show.
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Quakecon 2003 Wrap-up
Quakecon 2003, sponsored by NVIDIA, was bigger, badder, and more caffeinated than ever. In this video recap produced by Fountainhead Entertainment you can experience the sights and sounds of the largest multiplayer gaming contest ever including a special appearance by id Software's John Carmack.
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PRODUCTS |
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NVIDIA and PCI Express
NVIDIA is working hand-in-hand with Intel's workstation, desktop, and mobile engineering teams to help define, develop, and deploy PCI Express solutions. NVIDIA has developed a high-speed x16 graphics interconnect designed to evolve current PCI technology and address the increasing bandwidth demands of emerging graphics applications for multiple markets, including desktop PCs, mobile solutions, workstations, servers, and embedded communications systems. Click here to learn more.
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NVIDIA Quadro Crowned Professional Graphics Market Leader
According to International Data Corporation's (IDC) Worldwide Professional Graphics Update 2Q 2003, NVIDIA increased its personal workstation market share to 73 per cent for both 2D and 3D segments. IDC also found that NVIDIA demonstrated strength in the professional 2D market, growing this business more than 2.5 times faster than the overall 2D sector, to secure the segment lead with 53 per cent market share. More details are available here.
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Purchase Discounted Boards at the NVIDIA Board Store
NVIDIA's Board Store is now open. The NVIDIA Board Store is a secure and comprehensive online shopping site, selling a variety of graphics boards and accessories.
The NVIDIA Board Store was created as a place to get NVIDIA products at a significant discount, without the hassle of shopping around. We strive to keep a varied inventory including everything from GeForce2-class boards all the way up to our newest flagship products.
If you have not yet been approved to shop at the Board Store, please contact your account manager or the Board Store admin (jsousa@nvidia.com).
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Tip of the Month
Microsoft's IDxDiagContainer interface provides a convenient means for an application to obtain hardware and software information about a user's system. It is a COM interface easily run from within a C++ application. The interface can be queried for a specific property, or it can enumerate all properties available. For example, you can query for the graphics driver version using GetProp("szDriverVersion", &result). Also, you can query for the amount of physical video memory on the graphics card using szDisplayMemoryEnglish, which will return a string like "128 MB." The NVIDIA Developer Website will soon feature a convenient C++ class encapsulating this interface, making it even easier to add to your application.
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Popular Pages and Downloads
The most popular pages and downloads over the past few weeks have been:
- Everything.zip. 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 previous developer events.
- Cg Plug-ins for Maya. The Maya Cg Plug-in allows artists to author and visualize content in Maya 4.5 and Maya 5.0 using advanced hardware rendering and the Cg high level language.
- Cinematic Effects Video-Enhanced Presentation. This is a video-enhanced presentation of the Cinematic Effects talk that was given by Kevin Bjorke at GDC 2003.
The presentation combines video and audio with slides, allowing you to conveniently jump from slide to slide and view the demos.
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.
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For Korean and Japanese developers, the presentations we gave at Iron Developer 2003 (in Japan) and the GPU BBQ 2003 (in Korea) have been translated. They're available on the 
Announced recently, the 
