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Last Updated:
11
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30
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2003
Developer Newsletter: Issue #15
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DEVELOPER RESOURCES |
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Thank you for Participating in our Developer Survey
Thanks to everyone who participated in our Developer Survey. The information you provided will help us prioritize our efforts to deliver you the best possible tools and resources. We received several hundred responses from developers all over the world and appreciate the thoughtful answers and feature requests we received from many of you. Congratulations to the lucky Quadro FX 3000 winner!
Thanks again for making time to help us help you!
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52.16 ForceWare Drivers Released
On October 24, 2003, we introduced our new NVIDIA ForceWare release 50 graphics driver, a new Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) engineered to provide unmatched performance and image quality on both Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 and OpenGL® applications. In addition to its unmatched DirectX 9.0 application performance, this new graphics driver also delivers world-renowned compatibility, stability, and reliability across all NVIDIA GPUs on Windows 2000 and XP.
The graphics driver includes unified compiler technology that translates shader programs so that they are optimized for our GPU architecture, substantially improving the performance of next-generation DirectX 9.0 titles such as HalfLife™ 2, XIII, and more..
Other features include:
- Enhanced image quality for both anisotropic filtering and antialiasing
A new NVIDIA nView™ 3.0 multi-display setup wizard for easy configuration of your multi-display settings
nView gridlines to section off the display to help organize your various windows
Customized user profiles to save display settings and image quality settings on a per application/game basis
A new user-friendly interface
Microsoft DirectX and OpenGL support
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EVENTS |
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Come See us at Game Connection
Our Developer Relations team will be present at the Game Connection conference in Lyon, France from November 18 - 20. This convention allows developers, with projects, to meet, within a professional and confidential framework, publishers in search of original products or for a game developer to obtain a license. Each developer will dispose of a closed stand on which it can present its products to the publishers in private meetings.
Darryl Still and Zehra Bayramli from our European Developer Relations team will be presenting our The Way It's Meant to be Played programme to publishers and developers.
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PRODUCTS |
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GeForce FX 5950 and GeForce FX 5700 Launched
We recently announced the new NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, which is the fastest GPU we've ever produced. Manufactured using 0.13 micron process technology at TSMC, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra has a 256-bit wide memory bus, a 475 MHz core clock, and a 950 MHz memory clock. Designed to deliver cinematic-quality graphics and studio-quality color, the GeForce FX GPUs are the only full 128-bit precision computation GPUs in the industry.
At the same time, we also introduced the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, which is the first GPU we've produced in 0.13 micron at the IBM foundry in East Fishkill, NY. The GeForce FX 5700 series, with its 475 MHz core clock and 900 MHz memory clock, delivers an enthusiast feature set at a mainstream price to enable next-generation gaming for the masses. With the GeForce FX 5700 gamers can enjoy unbeatable DirectX 9.0 performance at a mainstream price.
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ForceWare Announced
We recently announced ForceWare, a powerful suite of software to complement our GPUs and media and communications processors (MCPs). ForceWare provides a host of complementary software for NVIDIA hardware to increase productivity, stability, and multimedia functionality. From the productivity tools of the NVIDIA nView™ desktop management software to the personal video recorder and DVD functionality of ForceWare Multimedia software, ForceWare solutions deliver a wide range of additional features ensuring that you maximize your NVIDIA hardware investment.
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Tip of the Month
Microsoft's HLSL compiler (fxc.exe) adds chip-specific optimizations based on the profile that you're compiling for. If your shaders require ps_2_0 or higher, you should use the ps_2_a profile, which is a superset of ps_2_0 functionality that directly corresponds to the GeForce FX family. Compiling to the ps_2_a profile, in conjunction with our latest ForceWare drivers, will probably give you better performance than compiling to the generic ps_2_0 profile. Please note that the ps_2_a profile was only available starting with the DirectX 9.0a release this past summer.
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Popular Pages and Downloads
The most popular pages and downloads over the past few weeks have been:
- NVIDIA Texture Tools. A collection of texture manipulation tools for manipulating DDS files, creating normal maps, working with compressed textures, and more.
- Everything.zip. All our Cg-related downloads (Cg NVSDK, Cg Toolkit, Cg Plug-ins, and documentation) in one convenient package.
- Presentations. Presentations from previous developer events.
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