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Last Updated:
10
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12
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2007
Developer Newsletter: Issue #27
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 SDK 9.1 Released
The latest version of the NVIDIA SDK will be available this week on our developer web site. This release includes several new code samples, bug fixes and improved documentation. Note: SDK 9.1 requires the DirectX 9 April 2005 SDK Update. New code samples include:
- GPU Video and Effects
- Discreet Cosine Transforms on the GPU
- Computing Image Histograms using Occlusion Queries
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 Translated Developer Newsletters Now Online
The last two developer newsletters are now available in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, in addition to English. To see previous newsletters, please visit our developer newsletter archive. If you aren't yet receiving the newsletter, make sure to sign up -- each month, it mentions the latest developer resources, upcoming events, recently released hardware, GPGPU news, valuable tips, job postings, and more.
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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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NVIDIA at E3 2005
 E3 2005 promises to be another exciting show for the interactive entertainment industry. There's no better place for you to play the hottest new titles, see the latest industry developments and trends, or make a sales pitch for your products.
This year, NVIDIA offered a SLI system seeding program to developers who wanted to show their games running on SLI in their booths. The following partners provided the components necessary to build these SLI systems: Corsair Memory, Creative Labs, Hitachi (Hard drives), MSI (Motherboards), XFX (Graphics Cards). Game Developers and Publishers including Epic, EIDOS, Majesco, Namco and WebZen are all taking advantage of the SLI seeding program and will have systems in their booths. This program coincides with NVIDIA's overall effort to get SLI into the hands of development community.
For inquiries regarding SLI systems for PC development purposes, please contact your account manager.
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Tip of the Month: The Benefits of Hardware Shadow Mapping
| Comparing Filtering for 64-Sample Soft Shadows |
Hardware
Shadow Mapping |
Regular
Percentage-Closer Filtering | Since the GeForce3 processor was released in 2001, NVIDIA GPUs have supported hardware-accelerated shadow map filtering. Hardware shadow mapping, as it is commonly known, allows shadow map queries to produce smoothly-varying gray-scale results that are superior to ordinary percentage-closer filtering (PCF) or nearest filtering. And because there are dedicated transistors on-chip, the smoother result comes at extremely low cost (often for free).
So how does "hardware shadow mapping" produce such a smooth result? Regular PCF is able to produce only as many shades of gray as the number of samples that are used. This results in marked blockiness as one zooms closer to shadowed regions unless the number of samples increases dramatically (which causes a corresponding load increase in the pixel shader).
In contrast, hardware shadow mapping uses a bilinear filter on top of the usual PCF step, resulting in smooth grey values even if the viewer zooms in on the shadowed regions. As you zoom in, hardware shadow mapping is therefore able to deliver arbitrarily higher quality without taking additional samples and while maintaining the same frame rate.
Learn more about hardware shadow mapping in Section 6.2 of 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: Mobile Device Developer Technology Engineer (USA, Europe, and Korea), and 3D Professional Applications Developer Technology Engineer.
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