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Last Updated:
08
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09
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2008
NVIDIA Developer Newsletter #42 - Siggraph 2008
In This Issue:
SIGGRAPH and
NVISION 2008 arrive this month! NVIDIA will be
presenting new products, ideas, and partners across the entire range of
computer experience, from astrophysics to attacking aliens.
Special NVISION reminder: the next generation Quadro
special offer ends Friday, August 18th!
NVISION 2008 is coming to San Jose,
California, August 25-27 -- a 55-hour, jaw-dropping, soul-jolting,
visual feast that will overwhelm your senses and leave you wanting
more.
Aside from amazing keynotes from
industry luminaries and an expo hall featuring leading visual
computing companies, the Professional
Developer Program will bring together 77
Hours of sessions on new technologies -- some never presented
before anywhere -- into a single unified venue for the first
time.
Technical
Session Invitation and Program Listing (PDF, ~300kb).
New Events Added:
- Emerging
Companies Summit
- Graphics processors now help power applications such as Google
Earth, 3D web applications and user interfaces, HD video playback,
virtual worlds, and other lifestyle and web applications. In
addition, GPUs are no longer needed just for graphics. They are now
designed and used to accelerate high-performance computing
applications ranging from financial market analyses,
electromagnetic simulations, oil and gas exploration, and other
scientific calculations.
- The Emerging
Companies Summit will showcase innovative companies who
contribute to the broader ecosystems of visual and high performance
computing. The event is sponsored by Cooley Godward Kronish, Ernst
& Young, Morgan Stanley, RR Donnelley, and Sutter Hill Ventures and
will be held at NVISION® 08.
- Bundle Conference: NVIDIA's Second Bundle Event
- The world's leading graphics cards makers, desktop and notebook PC
makers, etailers and retailers are eager to learn how they can use
"The Way It's Meant To Be PlayedTM" games to help market and sell
their GeForce powered hardware. They have requested the opportunity
to meet with you, the world's leading game publishers and
developers, to learn about your new titles for 2HY 2008 and 1HY
2009.
- Rather than run a series of presentations, you asked that we focus
our next event on the chance to meet one-on-one with each other. So
for NVISION this will be a "Bundle Hour" (that actually lasts for 2
hours) which starts at 4PM at the The Sainte Claire Hotel
in San Jose.
- Software developers should confirm your attendance
and willingness to meet with the world's leading resellers and OEMs
to Dave Edwards at NVIDIA
via BundleEvent@nvidia.com. Attendees will be asked to wear
clear name badges to facilitate easy introduction and there will be
tables and seating for private discussion
- Confirmed Guests at the Bundle Event Include:
- Acer
- ASUS
- Biostar
- Buy.com
- CyberPower
- Dell
- EVGA
- GIGABYTE
- iBUYPOWER
- Microcenter
- MSI
- NewEgg
- TigerDirect/CompUSA
- RSVP Today!
Besides the Developer Workshop itself, while in your "off duty" hours
at NVISION you can also compete for hundreds of thousands of dollars in
cash and prizes at the GeForce
LAN, the legendary LAN party five years in the making; or enjoy NVScene, an
unprecedented largest-ever gathering of creative minds in demoscene,
machinima, game modding, and digital art on US soil.
NVISION Technical Program
The NVIDIA Developer Workshop features numerous technical sessions.
Here's a list of those we've chosen with special interest to game developers.
For a full list, click here.
- Mobile Visual Computing
- Mike Rayfield, NVIDIA
- The Future of Rendering
- Rolf Herken, mental images
- Game Physics: The Next Frontier
- Manju Hegde, NVIDIA
- High Performance Computing
- David Kirk, NVIDIA
- Unreal Engine 3: Features and Tools Demo
- Tim Sweeney, Epic Games
- Developer Tools Showcase
- Randy Fernando, NVIDIA
- The New "X" Factor: An Introduction to NVIDIA PhysX
- James Dolan, Adam Moravansky, and Bob Whitecotton, NVIDIA
- mental mill & MetaSL: Advances in GPU Shader Authoring
- Rolf Berteig, mental images
- The Art of PhysX: A Guide to Game Creativity
- Dane Johnston, Monier Maher, and David Schoemehl, NVIDIA
- Beautiful Women of the Future
- Kevin Bjorke, NVIDIA
- Shape of Things to Come: Next-Gen Physics Deep Dive
- Bruno Heidelberger, Simon Schirm, NVIDIA
- Introduction to DirectX 11
- Kev Gee, Microsoft
- Life on the Bleeding Edge: More Secrets of the NVIDIA Demo Team
- Eugene d'Eon, NVIDIA
- Advances in Shader Writing with mental ray
- Andy Kopra, mental images
- mental images 3D Web Services Platform: RealityServer
- Ludwig von Reiche, mental images
- Easy Immersion with NVIDIA 3D Stereo
- Slava Gostrenko, NVIDIA
- Interactive Raytracing with CUDA (New Addition!)
- David Leubke and Steven Parker, NVIDIA
Follow this
link for registration and schedule info.
URL: http://www.nvision2008.com/Professionals/game.cfm
Visit NVIDIA on the Siggraph Exhibition Floor: Booths #554 and 655. Come by
to see the latest (and upcoming) Products and Professional Tools from NVIDIA
and our partners. You'll also find NVIDIA technology in the booths of several
other companies (ncluding a few introducing their new products at SIGGRAPH).
NVIDIA's Film Nominee: Tim Heath's short film "The Plush
Life", made at NVIDIA and rendered entirely in NVIDIA Gelato, can
be seen in this year's Competition Screenings at Siggraph 2008, and is
a nominee for the Jury Prize. Go Tim!
Meet the NVIDIA Developer Tools Team: Members of the NVIDIA
Developer Tools team will be on-hand to demonstrate and discuss
NVIDIA’s graphics tools, including PerfHUD 6, FX Composer 2.5, and the
new Shader Debugger at the following times at the NVIDIA Meeting Room
(#655), just across from the NVIDIA booth on the exhibition floor:
- Tuesday, August 12: 1:30 – 2:30 pm
- Wednesday, August 13: 2:00 – 3:00 pm
- Thursday, August 14: 2:00 – 3:00 pm
 NVIDIA Tech Presentations: This year's SIGGRAPH will again see NVIDIA
presenting leading-edge development work on topics ranging from
character animation, rendering, CUDA High-Performance Computing,
Interactive ray tracing, and more. NVIDIA will be presenting a special
full day of technical talks on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 in Room 405
of the Los Angeles Convention Center; two separate talks as part of the
standard SIGGRAPH programming; and we'll be involved throughout
SIGGRAPH and the associated graphics symposia.
During the NVIDIA tech talks on Wednesday, we'll also be giving away
prizes to attendees at each talk, including new GeForce GTX
280 graphics cards -- the ultimate SIGGRAPH souvenirs. Giveaways
will happen at each of the following tech talks:
- Next-Generation Hardware Rendering of Displaced Subdivision Surfaces
9:00 – 10:00 am, Wednesday, August 13, Room 405
Ignacio Castaño, NVIDIA Corporation
- In this talk we will provide an overview of the next-generation
tessellation pipeline and its motivation. Our focus will be on one
of the primary applications: rendering of displaced subdivision
surfaces, which dramatically increases the realism of animated
characters. We will also show how to adapt your production
pipelines in order to create compelling content that takes
advantage of this innovative rendering model.
- Real-Time Rendering of Realistic Hair
10:15 – 10:45 am, Wednesday, August 13, Room 405
Sarah Tariq, NVIDIA Corporation
- Simulating and rendering realistic hair with tens of thousands of
strands is something that until recently was prohibitively
expensive for real-time use. In this session, we will discuss how
to render realistic hair with high geometric complexity in
real-time on the GPU. Amongst other things we will cover efficient
creation and rendering of high amounts of geometry for hair
(essential for creating realistic hair especially when in motion),
shading, self-shadowing, level of detail, and important performance
optimizations. We will also talk about how to use next-generation
hardware tessellation to make creating and rendering hair much more
intuitive and efficient.
- Adaptive Terrain Tessellation on the GPU
10:45 – 11:15 am, Wednesday, August 13, Room 405
Iain Cantlay, NVIDIA Corporation
- Next-generation techniques implement highly-programmable
tessellation entirely on the GPU. We explain how tessellation can
be applied to terrain rendering with displacement mapping. Our
tessellation scheme is adaptive, with the polygon LOD varying as a
function of terrain roughness and also with view-dependent
silhouette detection.
- Getting Physical:
Solutions and Case Studies for Creating Scalable PhysX Content
11:30 am – 12:30 pm, Wednesday, August 13, Room 405
Monier Maher, NVIDIA Corporation
- Using physical simulation in applications takes their level of
immersion to new heights. NVIDIA’s PhysX enables developers to add
an unprecedented number of physical objects into scenes while
maintaining high performance. This talk will feature the latest
PhysX features and tools as well as real case studies that
highlight common challenges and solutions.
- A New Generation of Performance Analysis and Shader Authoring Tools
2:00 – 3:00 pm, Wednesday, August 13, Room 405
Jeffrey Kiel and Christopher Maughan, NVIDIA Corporation
- This talk covers the latest releases of NVIDIA's popular PerfKit
and FX Composer software products, as well as the brand-new NVIDIA
Shader Debugger. First, learn how to extract maximum GPU
performance using PerfHUD 6.0 (for real-time debugging and
profiling - with tons of powerful new features), GLExpert (for
OpenGL debugging), and PerfSDK (an API for accessing GPU
performance counters).
- Next, see how FX Composer 2.5 and the Shader Debugger can make
shader authoring, profiling, and debugging a breeze for
programmers, artists, and technical directors. This session
showcases new features such as a source-level shader debugging for
Cg and HLSL10 shaders, Direct3D 10 support (including geometry
shaders, stream out, and texture arrays), visual models & styles,
particle systems, a revamped user interface, and much more.
- CUDA: The Democratization of Parallel Computing
3:45 – 4:45 pm, Wednesday, August 13, Room 405
Paulius Micikevicius, NVIDIA Corporation
- Massively parallel computing, once the domain of supercomputers, is
now widely accessible in the form of millions of CUDA-enabled GPUs.
These GPUs are fully programmable, support tens of thousands of
concurrent threads, and have accelerated computations in a variety
of disciplines by up to 2 orders of magnitude.
- We will provide an overview of the newest GPU architecture, the
CUDA programming model, and latest development tools. CUDA enables
efficient implementation of parallel algorithms by providing a
small set of readily understood extensions to the C/C++ languages,
eliminating the need to learn a new language. Development is
facilitated by insightful profiling and debugging tools. Since the
GPU is the only widely available commodity "manycore" chip, we will
explore it as a research platform for parallel programming and
architecture.
- Interactive Ray Tracing with CUDA
5:00 – 6:00 pm, Wednesday, August 13, Room 405
David Luebke and Steven Parker, NVIDIA Corporation
- Ray tracing has long been associated with high-quality graphics,
but it has not been suitable for interactive use. With CUDA and an
NVIDIA GPU, it is now possible to ray trace reflections from curved
surfaces, refractions, and accurate shadows. By combining these
effects with rasterization to efficiently compute viewing ray
intersections, accurate inter-reflections and other effects can be
achieved at high resolutions and frame rates.
In addition, NVIDIA will be participating in these standard-program talks:
- Image-Space
Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion
3:45 - 5:30 pm, Wednesday, August 13, Room 502B
Louis Bavoil, Miguel Sainz, and Rouslan Dimitrov, NVIDIA Corporation
- Ambient occlusion is a lighting model that approximates the amount
of light reaching a point on a diffuse surface based on its
directly visible occluders. It provides a soft shadow appearance
which enhances depth perception and spatial relationship between
objects. In this talk, we will present a new algorithm for
rendering ambient occlusion as a post-processing pass by sampling a
depth buffer and its associated normal buffer. We will discuss how
to integrate this approach in real-time engines as well as provide
performance analysis.
- Real
Time Hair Simulation and Rendering on the GPU
1:45 - 3:30 pm, Thursday, August 14, Room 502B
Sarah Tariq and Louis Bavoil, NVIDIA Corporation
- Simulating and rendering realistic hair with tens of thousands of
strands is something that until recently was not possible in real
time. In this talk we present a method for simulating and
rendering realistic hair in real time using the power and
programmability of modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). Our
method utilizes new features of graphics hardware (including Stream
Output, Geometry Shader and Texture Buffers) that make it possible
for all simulation and rendering to be processed on the GPU in an
intuitive manner, with no need for CPU intervention or read back.
In addition, we propose fast new algorithms for inter-hair
collision, and collision detection and resolution of interpolated
hair.
URLs:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/siggraph-2008.html
http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/
http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/attendees/techtalks/sessions.php
NVSG, the
NVIDIA Scene Graph, has just
been updated with better tracking, occlusion culling, and an
updated "VisSim" complete sample application.
The NVIDIA Scene Graph Software Development Kit (NVSG SDK) is an
object-oriented programming library for creating scene graph-based
applications -- the NVSG is built from the ground up for modern
computer systems, rather than as a hacked reqorking of 1980's
workstation code. It supports CgFX, volume rendering, and is packaged
with multiple usage samples.
URL: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvsg_home.html
http://physxcomp.thegamecreators.com/
is the address you'll need to try your hand at the Game Creators/PhysX
demo competition. Software and assets are provided free and prizes are
to be supplied by ASUS and EVGA.
The new competetion is really two contests in one: both a challenge to
create new demos for specific features of the NVIDIA PhysX
toolkit running within The Game Creator's Dark Physics
software, and also a challenge to create an "Über demo" with the simple
criterion: knock our socks off!
The initial proposal deadline has already passed bu there's still time
to create an uber demo, with a closing deadline of August 31st. See here for
all the details, and here for
downloadable software (including a complete Dark Physics package) and
freely-available media files that you may use (or not) to build your
winning demo!
Video: A Quick Dark
Physics How-To
URLs:
http://physxcomp.thegamecreators.com/
http://physxcomp.thegamecreators.com/details.html
http://physxcomp.thegamecreators.com/downloads.html
http://www.youtube.com/v/8uTBHyC4f94
Along with "last
month's update to NVIDIA's Shader Authoring Tools, The NVIDIA
Shader Library has also been updated, with new samples and broad
revisions across the board for both OpenGL, DirectX9, and DirectX 10
users.
- Support for DirectX 10's new Shader Model 4 and "technique10" format is
provided for many HLSL effects.
- Vertex and pixel (fragment) functions have been re-written to explicitly
pass "global" effect properties as formal parameters -- this makes it much
simpler for developers to copy-and-paste shader code back and forth between
the shader library and "real world" shaders in running games.
- Extra macros for support of DCC apps such as 3DSMax, XSI, and game 3D
engines like Torque and OGRE have been provided to HLSL effects.
- Support has been added for object-space lighting -- a simple macro change
is all that's required.
- Support for COLLADA shared-surface shadowing has been expanded.
- New shaders like "post_godrays" (pictured above).
Users of engines like Torque
Game Engine Advanced and OGRE
3D were key voices in the changes relating to global variables,
macros, and object-space lighting -- these options were specifically
added to make life simpler for you.
URL: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/shaderlibrary/webpages/shader_library.html
The Cg
Toolkit Beta 2.1 is now available -- this new version adds Cg
translation support to HLSL10 for Cg usage in Direct3D 10, while
maintaining complete code compatability with all previous profiles for
DirectX and Open GL on a wide variety of platforms.
The components of the Cg Toolkit include:
- NVIDIA Cg Compiler Release 2.1
- Cg/CgFX Runtime libraries for OpenGL and Direct3D
- Cg User's Manual
- Documentation for the Cg Language Specification, runtime APIs, Cg
standard library, CgFX states, and the Cg profiles.
- Cg example programs
Cg 2.1 supports a broad range of desktop operating systems (Windows 2000,
XP, Vista, Mac OS X for Tiger and Leopard, 32-bit and 64-bit x86 Linux, and
x86 Solaris) so your shader-enabled applications can use the same shaders
no matter your choice of operating system or graphics API.
URL: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_2_1_beta.html
As we announced in the May
Newsletter, NVIDIA, in conjunction with publisher Addison-Wesley, has been
making some of the very best GPU information and
documentation available online -- for free!
Here are the chapters serialized since our last
update:
Prefer a printed copy for your desk? Newsletter readers can purchase beautifully
printed versions of all our books at a 30% discount,
courtesy of InformIT and Addison-Wesley. Just follow this link.
URLs:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_part01.html
http://www.informit.com/promotion/136275
This month we're skipping the developer survey in favor of of giving away
even more NVIDIA-powered graphics cards to developers right on the spot
at SIGGRAPH. See you in Los Angeles!
- Curious about Previous NVIDIA Developer Newsletters? Try these:
- Issue 41: July 2008
- Issue 40: June 2008
- Issue 39: May 2008
- Issue 38: GDC 2008
If you prefer not to receive the NVIDIA Developer Newsletter in the future,
please unsubscribe at http://lyris01.nvidia.com/devRelRegister/frmOptOut.asp.
NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) is the worldwide leader in graphics
processors and media communications devices. For more information about
NVIDIA please visit our website: www.nvidia.com.
© 2008 NVIDIA Corporation
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