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Last Updated:
10
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12
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2007
Developer Newsletter: Issue #22
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NVIDIA Developer Tools Survey
What do you need from NVIDIA to create awesome products? Last year we listened to your feedback and added dozens of new features to FX Composer, NVPerfHUD, Melody, and the Texture Tools. We also started working on a new performance analysis infrastructure for OpenGL applications.
Help shape the future of NVIDIA developer tools by completing our survey today. We will use the information we receive to prioritize future projects and focus our time and energy to meet your needs.
Don’t hold back! Tell us what we’re we doing right, and where we’re screwing up! We want to hear how you think we should invest our time and energy on developer tools.
Several survey participants will be selected at random to receive a GeForce 6800 GT or the popular book GPU Gems: Programming Techniques, Tips, and Tricks for Real-Time Graphics.
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Bump Map Compression Whitepaper Posted
 Almost all new video games are using bump mapping to some extent. While there is no doubt this improves the realism and visual complexity of scenes, the additional video memory consumed by having bump map textures for every surface can become problematic. The increasing popularity of the techniques that automatically generate normal maps from high resolution models further increases storage requirements because in this case normal maps cover the whole of each model without any reuse. This whitepaper discusses the various options for compressing bump maps.
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Cg 1.3 Released
Cg Release 1.3 Beta 2 has been released with support for the latest GeForce 6 Series and Quadro FX GPUs. This version of Cg offers the following features and improvements:
- New vp40 profile, which enables texture sampling from within vertex programs
- New fp40 profile, which provides a robust branching model in fragment programs, and support for output to multiple draw buffers ("MRTs")
- Support for writing more than one color output (i.e., MRTs) in the arbfp1 and ps_2* profiles
- New semantics to access OpenGL fixed-function state vectors from within ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program
- New "-fastprecision" option for arbfp*, fp30, and fp40 profiles, to use reduced precision storage (fp16) when appropriate.
- Support for 16 profiles.
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FX Composer Tip Area
FX Composer empowers developers to create high performance shaders in an integrated development environment with unique real-time preview & optimization features. Visit our Tip Area for helpful information on FX Composer.
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NVPerfHUD 2.1 Released
NVPerfHUD helps you analyze your graphics pipeline performance one stage at a time and displays real-time statistics that can be used to diagnose performance bottlenecks in your Direct3D 9 applications. NVPerfHUD 2.1 has several minor bug fixes and additional support for applications with tricky rendering loops. All your favorite features from NVPerfHUD 2.0 are still there, including drag-and-drop application launching, a batch-size histogram, shader visualization, and pipeline analysis experiments.
Be sure to check out the Getting Started instructions in the NVPerfHUD User Guide, and read through the methodology for effectively identifying and crushing performance bottlenecks in your application.
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Special SLI Offer from NVIDIA and SuperMicro
NVIDIA and SuperMicro are pleased to announce a special offer for our developers. Many of you have looked forward to getting your hands on SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology for multiple GPUs. SuperMicro has put together a bare bones SLI reference system that you can purchase.
If you are not aware of it, SLI is a new NVIDIA technology that intelligently scales graphics performance through multiple NVIDIA GPUs in a single PCI Express system. SLI scales both geometry and fill rate/pixel shader performance for two GPUs using various methods, including inter- and intra-frame scalability algorithms.
Please visit SuperMicro to find out more about this special offer.
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Become a Registered Developer Today
Joining our Registered Developer program is free and gives you access to a number of benefits:
- Developer Forums
- Prerelease Tools
- Prerelease Drivers
- Bug Reporting
Joining is easy! Simply fill out one of applications below:
Please note that it may take a few weeks to receive a decision on your application, due to the large number of applicants.
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GPGPU Feature: GPGPU Course Notes from IEEE Visualization 2004
The complete course notes have been posted for the full-day GPGPU course held at IEEE Visualization 2004. The course titled, "GPGPU: General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processors" was held on Monday, October 11th, 2004 in Austin, Texas. The course begins with the architectural, economic, and programmatic motivations behind GPGPU. It then introduces a "hello world" GPGPU example and describes the stream programming model in detail (including Brook). Mathematical and algorithmic primitives are then presented, followed by descriptions of many of the low-level technical details required for effective real-world GPGPU programming. The course concludes with several case studies and a discussion of the future architectural, application, and research possibilities for GPGPU. The course organizer was Aaron Lefohn, and the presenters were Ian Buck, Aaron Lefohn, John Owens, and Robert Strzodka.
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GoForce 3D 4500
The NVIDIA GoForce 3D 4500 wireless media processor (WMP) enables a whole new level of interactive content not previously possible on cell phones, PDAs, or other handheld devices. GoForce 3D 4500 features High-Performance 3D and Multimedia Functionality, Revolutionary Power Management, and 3.1 Megapixel Camera Support in a single processor.
>> Read Press Release
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nForce4
NVIDIA nForce4 MCPs provide the platform technology that is designed to power this year’s fastest gaming, enthusiast, and digital media PCs and motherboards, driving the PCI Express revolution with advanced capabilities (including SLI technology) not found on any other competing core-logic solution.
>> Read Press Release
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NVIDIA DVD Decoder
The NVIDIA DVD Decoder is the first software decoder to receive the “Designed for Media Center Edition” certification, ensuring that it will deliver premium video quality and unmatched performance for Media Center PCs.
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Tip of the Month
When you're trying to debug your application and find potential bottlenecks, there are some simple steps you should take to ensure accurate measurements:
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Verify that the application runs cleanly. For example, when the application runs with Microsoft’s DirectX Debug runtime, it should not generate any errors or warnings.
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Ensure that the test environment is valid. That is, make sure you are running release versions of the application and its DLLs, as well as the release runtime of the latest version of DirectX.
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Use release versions (not debug builds) for all software.
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Make sure all display settings are set correctly. Typically, this means that they are at their default values. Anisotropic filtering and antialiasing settings particularly influence performance.
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Disable vertical sync. This ensures that your frame rate is not limited by your monitor’s refresh rate.
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Run on the target hardware. If you’re trying to find out if a particular hardware configuration will perform sufficiently, make sure you’re running on the correct CPU, GPU, and with the right amount of memory on the system. Bottlenecks can change significantly as you move from a low-end system to a high-end system.
Learn more by reading our GPU Programming Guide.
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Job Openings
NVIDIA's Developer Technology group is always looking for talented engineers and artists in the US, Japan, and Europe. See http://talent.nvidia.com for more general information, or our specific openings for: Handheld Devices Developer Technology Engineer, Developer Technology Engineer (Korea), and Developer Technology Engineer (USA).
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Graphics Pipeline Performance
