Last Updated:
03
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04
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2009
NVIDIA Developer Newsletter 46: February 2009
In This "February 31st" Issue...
This March, NVIDIA will offer several talks at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. We're jazzed about what we have to talk about at this GDC, and have a few surprises in store as well. This month's newsletter will take a look at those talks, as well as a recap of announcements and news since last month's newsletter was published.
We hope to see you at the GDC!
Once again, NVIDIA developers will be presenting once again at this year's GDC in San Francisco. This is your chance to see new material and success stories from developers that built games like Dead Rising 2 and Mirror's Edge, as well as sneak peeks into upcoming tools from NVIDIA.
NVIDIA will have an ExpoSuite at the GDC in the Moscone Convention Center, West Hall, Booth #656.
As in GDCs past, we'll also be entering the attendees of each sponsored talk into a per-session drawing for one of NVIDIA's latest high-performance GPU's. So come by, learn something, and maybe walk away with a new GeForce GTX 285 (can I get a "Woot!" over here?).
Whether you're a hardcore game developer looking into CUDA, or a visual artist looking for better ways to master shaders, we've got something for you at this year's GDC. Bookmark http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gdc-2009.html to get the "last minute" updates on what NVIDIA has planned for GDC 2009. Below are the announced NVIDIA-sponsored sessions for GDC 2009:
Discuss Developer Tools with Us at GDC 2009
If you have feedback or requests for our developer tools (PhysX tools, PerfHUD, FX Composer, Shader Debugger, Texture Tools, etc…), we encourage you to visit us! Feel free to drop by our Expo Suite (ES 656, West Hall) between 1:30 pm and 2:30 pm each day of the GDC 2009 exhibition (March 25 – 27) to meet with members of our developer tools team. Please RSVP to Kumar Iyer (kiyer@nvidia.com) if you're interested. We look forward to talking with you!
NVIDIA-sponsored sessions
| NVIDIA APEX: From Mirror’s Edge to Pervasive Cinematic Destruction |
12:00-1:00 pm, Room 3005 (West Hall), Wednesday, Mar 25
Speakers: Anders Caspersson, EA DICE, and Jean Pierre Bordes & Monier Maher, NVIDIA Corporation |
| In this talk, we discuss the process of integrating physics in Mirror’s Edge, highlight some of the challenges that occur when using traditional physics middleware to create eye-catching content, and introduce a new technology that empowers artists to quickly create pervasive cinematic quality destructible environments. [Official GDC Link] |
| The In and Out: Making Games Play Right with 3D Stereoscopic Technologies |
4:00-5:00 pm, Room 3016 (West Hall), Thursday, Mar 25
Speakers: Samuel Gateau, NVIDIA Corporation |
| This session will present an overview of Stereoscopic graphic technology, and cover the common pitfalls and solutions a developer needs to be aware of to ensure that their content will create a compelling 3D experience. Topics to be covered include: achieving out of screen effects, displaying 3D video content, and how to design a 3D friendly user interface. With live demonstrations!! [Official GDC Link] |
| CUDA and Multi-Core Gaming: Lessons from the Trenches |
4:00-5:00 pm, Room 3016 (West Hall), Thursday, Mar 26
Speakers: Dan Amerson (Emergent Game Technologies), Dermot Gallacher (Instinct Technology), and Avi Bleiweiss (NVIDIA Corporation), |
| This session will present real-world case studies of using GPU Computing to accelerate general game algorithms. Highlights will include prototyping a general computing system that leverages the GPU in Emergent’s Gamebryo engine, and leveraging GPU Computing to turbocharge AI algorithms.[Official GDC Link] |
| NVIDIA APEX: High-Definition Physics with Clothing and Vegetation |
9:00-10:00 am, Room 2011 (West Hall), Friday, Mar 27
Speakers: Jean Pierre Bordes & Monier Maher, NVIDIA Corporation |
| In this talk, we introduce a new technology that empowers artists to quickly create fully interactive in-game clothing and vegetation. We show how you can dress your game characters with high-definition interactive simulated clothing using APEX tools, and provide a real world example in an MMOG engine. Next we show how you can breathe life into your SpeedTree's by creating physically interactive leaves, branches, trees, and forests using APEX [Official GDC Link] |
| Platform-independent Shader Development with mental mill: The Making of Dead Rising 2 |
12:00-1:00 pm, Room 2011 (West Hall), Friday, Mar 27
Speakers: Izmeth Siddeek, Blue Castle Games and Laura Scholl |
| Up until now shaders that describe complex and life-like looks have been left to those with computer science degrees and extensive programming experience. mental mill®, puts the artist in the driver’s seat. The artist has complete creative control to write and debug MetaSL™ shaders, build shader graphs and Phenomena™, preview render in mental ray® and export to 3D DCC applications and GPU shading languages. In this session we will demonstrate mental mill and discuss how it revolutionized the look development pipeline for the making of the game, Dead Rising 2.[Official GDC Link] |
Other Sessions Featuring NVIDIA
| Math/Physics for Programmers |
Monday (March 23) 10:00am - 6:00pm and Tuesday (March 24) 10:00am - 6:00pm, Room 3020, West Hall
NVIDIA Speaker: Jim Van Verth |
As co-author of the book "Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications", Jim will present a portion of this two-day event focused on teaching students the fundamentals of math and physics for game development. Please see the following link for more details. [Official GDC Link] |
| Advanced Visual Effects with Direct3D for PC |
Monday (March 23, 2009) 10:00am - 6:00pm, Room 3006, West Hall
NVIDIA Speakers: Cem Cebenoyan, Sarah Tariq, and Simon Green |
| This full-day session will highlight techniques for using the latest version of DirectX to create cutting-edge visuals for games. New features of the API, algorithms for lighting and shadowing, and performance optimization will be covered.[Official GDC Link] |
| Khronos Developer University |
Tuesday (March 24, 2009) 10:00am - 7:00pm, Room 3002, West Hall
NVIDIA Speakers: Neil Trevett, Barthold Lichtenbelt |
| This full-day tutorial will focus on Khronos open standards for media and compute acceleration, including OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenGL ES and OpenKODE. [Official GDC Link][Official Khronos Link] |
| Morpheme & PhysX: A New Approach to Combining Character Animation and Simulation |
4:00-5:00 pm, Room 3016 (West Hall), Thursday, Mar 26
NVIDIA Speaker To Be Announced |
| During the course of this session, an NVIDIA speaker will discuss how PhysX was used to enhance the character animation features found in NaturalMotion's morpheme 2.0.[Official GDC Link] |
The Cg gnomes have been busy in the shader compiler mines, and have surfaced with not one, but two cool announcements. The first is the February 2009 release of Cg 2.1, which includes several incremental fixes. The second is the announcement of the initial beta of Cg 2.2, which included numerous enhancements, bug fixes, and features. We strongly encourage you to grab the beta and give us feedback on the Cg forums.
We gave our interns an unlimited supply of highly-caffeinated beverages, and in return they pumped out an astounding 12 more chapters of the highly-acclaimed GPU Gems 3 book, now available for free online!
These chapters cover a broad range of topics, all pulled from Part IV (Image Effects) and Part V (Physics Simulation). The current plan is that the complete, free online version of GPU Gems 3 will be completed by GDC 2009.
We've updated the beta of version 5 of NVSG, the NVIDIA Scene Graph API. This beta supports 32 and 64 bit versions of both Windows and Linux. Some of the features of this release include:
- Native support for loading MetaSL shaders
- Cg 2.1 support for expanded rendering capabilities and better performance
- Render framework optimization, delivering substantial performance improvements – especially for larger, shader-bound scenes
- Massive scene capabilities from NVScale functionality on Quadro Plex systems
- 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.
Click here for more details.
We'd like to thank all of you that attended the first two sessions of the UE3 PhysX training sessions. For those of you that missed it, you can find both sessions, ready for on-demand viewing, here. If you're interested in viewing these sessions as they happen, 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.
Over the next few months, you're going to see more and more changes to our website: Better navigation, easier-to-find content, and deeper integration with external services. One of the small steps we've taken is revamping the developer tools page and the documentation page to be more theme-oriented. We've split the tools page into five key sections now: Software Development, Performance Tools, Shader Authoring, PhysX Tools, and Texture and Image Tools. The documentation page is now divided into sections focusing on articles as well as upcoming and past events. We hope you find this new organization useful. I you have any feedback, good or bad, we'd love to hear it -- please visit our site feedback page and let us know what you think!
NVIDIA Corporation today responded to a Monday court filing (Court of Chancery in the State of Delaware) in which Intel alleged that the four-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed does not extend to Intel’s future generation CPUs with “integrated” memory controllers, such as Nehalem. The filing does not impact NVIDIA chipsets that are currently being shipped.
- Curious about previous NVIDIA Developer Newsletters? Try these:
- Issue 45: January 2009
- Issue 44: NVISION 2008 Followup
- Issue 43: NVISION 2008
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© 2009 NVIDIA Corporation
