Last Updated:
01
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21
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2009
NVIDIA Developer Newsletter 45: January 2009
In This Issue:
We're delighted to announce that our monthly developer newsletter has returned after a 3-month hiatus! Rather than inundating you with all the announcements and news over the last few months, we've decided to just pick a handful of key items that highlight some of the amazing things that have taken place since September. We've also added a survey at the end to ask for your opinion about this newsletter and what we can do to improve it.
NVIDIA made a big splash at CES 2009 in Las Vegas with our new GeForce 3D Vision stereoscopic 3D glasses. 3D technologies have come a long way recently and are no longer the novelty they used to be. GeForce 3D Vision wireless active shutter glasses are the world’s only 3D glasses to work with brand new pure 120 Hz LCD displays available now from Samsung and ViewSonic. These new glasses deliver full resolution 1680x1050 3D images per eye with zero LCD ghosting, allowing you to crank up the depth for full 3D immersion. By combining higher refresh rate LCDs, full resolution, and increased 3D depth amount, GeForce 3D Vision enables the highest quality 3D immersive experience with no eye strain.
The reaction to GeForce 3D Vision has been amazing. Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal picked it as one of the top gadgets for 2009. CNET nominated it for Best of CES. PC World also named it for Best of CES, as did GearCrave.
Editors have gotten their hands on the technology now for reviews and they love it:
“So, it should be clear to you by now that not only am I thoroughly impressed with NVIDIA’s GeForce 3D Vision technology but that pretty much all of the people I showed it to were as well.”
“And while shooters looked great in real-3D, RTS games truly change for the better in 3D stereo mode. Spore is a different animal altogether when playing with GeForce 3D Vision. It's literally a game-changer, in a very good way.”
Developers love it, too. Develop magazine’s report includes 3D Vision love from Microsoft, Ubisoft and Capcom.
"NVIDIA's 3D Vision technology has received support from across the gaming industry at CES 09, adding momentum to the emergence of stereoscopic display as an affordable reality for consumers," reports Will Freeman in Develop magazine.
In addition to GeForce 3D Vision, NVIDIA has introduced the Ion platform. GeForce 9400 is a world-class product that allows users to watch HD video, edit their photos and video, and play modern games. It is a superior product that pairs very well with the Intel Atom CPU, turning netbooks into great gaming platforms.
The Taiwan Game Master/Content Professional Seminar 2009 was held at the Taiwan Digital Content Institute on December 11th and 12th. Featured speakers were Keita Iida, Rev Lebaredian, Ashutosh Rege, Calvin Lin, and Quan Chen. Attended by over 100 game development professionals and academics, the seminar focus was on leveraging NVIDIA technologies and advanced graphics development techniques.
Keep an eye on the NVIDIA Developer Documentation page for a future link to the Tawian seminar presentations!
When the Spore team wanted to test their dynamic material system for performance bottlenecks, they turned to NVIDIA's ShaderPerf utility for help. Read more about their experiences here.
Photoshop CS4 jockeys now have their chance to showcase their talents in the Pixel Bender™ coding contest contest, sponsored by NVIDIA. The overall winner will receive an Alienware Area-51 PC, while each category winner will receive an NVIDIA graphics card. Remember to sign up before the cutoff of January 31st! The entry form can be found here, and the terms and conditions of the contest are detailed here.
We're delighted to announce the addition of several new chapters to our free GPU Gems 3 page! The most recent chapters come from Part II and III of the GPU Gems 3 book, focusing on Light & Shadows and Rendering, specifically:
- Chapter 11: Efficient and Robust Shadow Volumes Using Hierarchical Occlusion Culling and Geometry Shaders by Martin Stich (mental images), Carsten Wächter, and Alexander Keller (Ulm University)
- Chapter 12: High-Quality Ambient Occlusion by Jared Hoberock and Yuntao Jia (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
- Chapter 13: Volumetric Light Scattering as a Post-Process by Kenny Mitchell (Electronic Arts)
- Chapter 14: Advanced Techniques for Realistic Real-Time Skin Rendering Eugene d’Eon and David Leubke (NVIDIA Corporation)
- Chapter 15: Playable Universal Capture George Borshukov, Jefferson Montgomery, and John Hable (Electronic Arts)
- Chapter 16: Vegetation Procedural Animation and Shading in Crysis, Tiago Sousa (Crytek)
- Chapter 17: Robust Multiple Specular Reflections and Refractions. Tamás Umenhoffer (Budapest University of Technology and Economics), Gustavo Patow (University of Girona), and László Szirmay-Kalos (Budapest University of Technology and Economics)
- Chapter 18: Relaxed Cone Stepping for Relief Mapping, Fabio Policarpo (Perpetual Entertainment) and Manuel M. Oliveira (Instituto de Informática—UFRGS)
- Chapter 19: Deferred Shading in Tabula Rasa,
Rusty Koonce (NCsoft Corporation)
- Chapter 20: GPU-Based Importance Sampling,
Mark Colbert (University of Central Florida) and Jaroslav Krivánek (Czech Technical University in Prague)
We look forward to offering more chapters in the coming months!
We are pleased to announce that the latest GeForce® notebook drivers are now available directly on NVIDIA's notebook driver website. These drivers deliver sharp, crystal-clear, on-the-go graphics with lightning fast performance for games, videos, and images, all while maintaining manufacturer customizations, including hotkeys.
Any game developer using or considering Unreal Engine 3 and PhysX™ is invited to sign up for NVIDIA's free Unreal Engine 3 PhysX training series, which will commence on Wednesday, Jan. 21 at 8AM PST. Tutorials will be approximately 60 minutes in length and held once weekly through mid-March. Topics will include cloth creation, fluids, force fields, rigid bodies, joints and constraints, actor creation, performance tuning and more. To save your seat, send an email to: PhysX_Training@nvidia.com and insert "PhysX Training Request" in the subject line. You will receive more detailed information by return email once your request has been received.
The NVIDIA GeForce 8 and 9 Series GPU Programming Guide provides useful advice on how to identify bottlenecks in your applications, as well as how to eliminate them by taking advantage of the GeForce 8 and 9 Series’ features.
In addition, a special section on DirectX 10 will inform you of common problems encountered when porting from DirectX 9 to DirectX 10. It is available in English and includes chapters on:
- How to Optimize Your Application
- General GPU Performance Tips
- GeForce 8 and 9 Series Programming Tips
- Considerations when using DirectX 10
- NVIDIA Performance Tools
- And more!
We are pleased to announce (somewhat belatedly in this newsletter) the November release of the Cg Toolkit 2.1. We are even more pleased to offer a news-breaking tip to our newsletter subscribers that the beta version of Cg Toolkit 2.2 is currently planned for release near the end of January. While we cannot guarantee this timeframe, we are working very hard to get the beta in developer's hands as soon as possible. We encourage you to monitor the nvidiadeveloper Twitter-feed for up-to-date announcements.
We are pleased to release fully-supported drivers for OpenGL® 3.0 for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux on select GeForce® and Quadro® solutions.
Further demonstrating our leadership and commitment to OpenGL and the standardization process, these drivers enable software developers to take full advantage of all OpenGL 3.0 capabilities, accelerating their delivery of cutting-edge media platforms and applications.
The Beta for NVSG 5.0 has begun and are all welcome to participate. The current version includes support for NVScale (in conjunction with Quadro Plex) and will soon provide support for MetaSL. The new beta includes the following features:
- Cg 2.1 support for expanded rendering capabilities and better performance
- Render framework optimization, delivering substantial performance improvements – especially for larger, shader-bound scenes
- Distributed rendering on multi-GPU systems for greater capabilities in large model visualization
- 10-bit/component color support for significant image quality improvements when used with compatible hardware.
- New stencil buffer support, including a new StencilAttribute, enabling stencil buffer operations to occur per drawable.
A second beta is planned for the end of January. Please monitor the NVSG page or subscribe to the nvidiadeveloper Twitter-feed for the latest news.
The NVScale Software Development Kit is a programming library that optimizes multi-GPU rendering of OpenGL-applications with Quadroplex products.
With NVIDIA’s PCIe Gen 2 chipsets and Quadroplex products, NVIDIA delivers an ideal platform for multi-GPU rendering that multiplies the performance and the graphics card memory available to professional high-end graphics applications. The NVScale SDK is the developers toolkit to harvest these multi-GPU advantages and helps the developer to reduce the overhead of multi-GPU systems so that he can focus on his application.
Features (NVScale 1.0):
- OpenGL-based
- Quadroplex only
- Up to 8 GPUs with current systems
- Up to 32 GB of addressable video memory with current Quadroplexes
- Platforms: Linux 64-bit/ Windows XP 64-bit
- Auxiliary functions to ease use of NVIDIA Multi-GPU systems
- Alpha-compositing
- Depth-compositing
- Screen-compositing
- Configurable compositing: 1-1, n-1, hierarchical, hybrid
For more details, please visit the NVScale page.
We're proud to announce the release of PerfHUD 6.5 Beta, NVIDIA's award-winning Direct3D debugger and performance analysis tool. Please visit the features list to see the comprehensive (and lengthy) set of new features added to this beta!
Please also note that PerfHUD 6.5 will be available in final release sometime later this month!
We are pleased to announce that PhysX is now the physics platform of choice for Electronic Arts , 2K Games, and THQ. Games that leverage PhysX continue to amaze consumers, and are getting rave reviews by leading trade journalists. Here are just a few comments regarding the PhysX features seen in Mirror's Edge:
- Videogamer.com: “Thanks to PhysX every-day objects within the game become part of the overall experience. Cloth, flags, and banners can now impact weapons and players; ground fog interacts with the player's footsteps; explosions fill the air with smoke and debris; and weapon impacts are enhanced with interactive particles.”
- TrustedReviews.com: "If you do grab the PC version of Mirror's Edge, you're almost certainly going to want an nVidia GPU in your PC, because otherwise you'll miss out on a bunch of PhysX enhancements Dice is working into the game."
- Anandtech.com: "The cloth, plastic and tarp effects are what look like the real icing on the cake in the game though. The complete absence of the cloth objects when physics is disabled makes an already sparse looking world look pretty empty by comparison."
We are also proud to announce the release of the NVIDIA PhysX Plug-ins for Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya. These plug-ins allow users to easily create, manipulate and export physics simulations directly in the content creation tool of their choice. The plug-ins support a wide range of features such as:
- Rigid bodies
- Constraint specification
- Cloth
- Fluids
- Soft bodies
- Force fields
- Exporting
- Numerous sample projects
Download them today from the PhysX DCC Plug-ins page.
NVIDIA Developer Events Calendar for 2009
We look forward to seeing you at these events! Please watch future newsletters for specific details on special events, presentations, event track details, etc.
- Game Developers Conference 2009. March 23-27, 2009. Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA
- SIGGRAPH 2009. August 3-7, 2009. Ernest Morial Convention Center, New Orleans, LA
- NVISION 2009. Details coming in next month's newsletter!
Coda...and a Survey
Many of you may have noticed the lack of a newsletter from NVIDIA over the last several months. The good news is that NVIDIA recently hired David "LetsKillDave" Weller, former Program Manager on the Microsoft XNA and DirectX teams, to lead the charge at revamping the newsletter and developer website. This means you will be seeing a lot of changes in the coming months -- changes designed to make it easier to get the latest news, content, and tools from NVIDIA.
As part of NVIDIA's expansion into social media, you can now subscribe to nvidiadeveloper on Twitter to get the latest "tweets" on news and information that's related to graphics and game development. If you're not a twitter user, or prefer to see an RSS feed, you can subscribe to the same feed here using your favorite RSS reader.
Speaking of social interactions, a "mea culpa" is in order: We have recently noticed that the NVIDIA developer forums registration process was failing to send registration confirmations. This has resulted in many new users being unable to actively participate in the NVIDIA developer forums. We have since corrected this issue and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you have already attempted to register, but aren't able to post to the forums, please log into the forum section and tell the system to send you another validation email. If all else fails, please don't hesitate to contact David Weller directly at dweller@nvidia.com.
Finally, in order to continue improving the quality of these newsletters, we invite you to complete a short, five-question survey. We thank you in advance for your feedback!
Please
click here to take the survey.
- Curious about previous NVIDIA Developer Newsletters? Try these:
- Issue 44: NVISION 2008 Followup
- Issue 43: NVISION 2008
- Issue 42: Siggraph 2008
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© 2009 NVIDIA Corporation
