Last Updated: 09 / 28 / 2005

Headline Archive 2005

NVIDIA Developer Toolkit Overiew

This two page PDF previews our NVIDIA Developer Toolkit DVD, which will be available at SIGGRAPH. Come to our booth and sponsored sessions on Thursday, August 4 to get one.

Developer Technology Group Job Openings

Our Developer Technology group is looking for engineers who are passionate about 3D graphics and high-performance GPUs. If you fit the description below, please send us your resume.

Position: Developer Technology Engineer(s) [Location: U.S., Europe, or Asia-Pacific]

Job description: Work with some of the most talented cutting-edge game developers throughout the world. Interact closely with the architecture and driver teams at NVIDIA in ensuring the best possible experience on current generation hardware, and on determining trends and features for next generation architectures. Play with the latest GPU technology to develop new rendering techniques, create technical demos, write whitepapers, and present your work at conferences. Collaborate with game developers on 3D rendering effects and optimization for specific upcoming titles.

Skills required: Strong knowledge of 3D graphics technologies, including shaders, shading languages, and rendering techniques. Familiarity with 3D games and gaming technologies. Strong knowledge of C++ and programming techniques. Experience in DirectX or OpenGL game and engine development a strong plus. Understanding of 3D graphics architecture a plus. Good communication skills required. Travel for on-site visits with developers and to conferences will be required.

NVPerfKit 1.0 RC1 Available

NVPerfKit gives you access to low-level performance counters inside the driver, and hardware counters inside the GPU itself. The performance counters are available to OpenGL and DirectX applications via the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Performance Data Helper (PDH) interface and the PIX for Windows NVIDIA Plug-in.

The counters can be used to determine exactly how your application is using the GPU, identify performance issues, and confirm that performance problems have been resolved. Now, for the first time ever, this confidential information is available to third party developers.

NVSG SDK 2.1.0.5 Beta Released

The latest NVSG SDK includes SLI support, full shader support for the latest GPUs via CgFX 1.4, multiple camera manipulators, improved LOD support, multithreading improvements, support for new texture formats, and much more.

NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2005

NVIDIA engineers will be involved in several sessions, courses, and presentations at SIGGRAPH 2005. Don't miss these, as well as a chance to meet our team at the NVIDIA booth.

Sponsored Sessions (Thursday, Aug. 4)

GPU Rendering Analysis and Performance Tools [10 am - 12 pm]
GPU Programming Exposed: The Naked Truth Behind NVIDIA's Demos [1 - 3 pm]

Sketches (Thursday, Aug. 4)

Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows [10:30 am - 12:15 pm]
GPU-Accelerated Iterated Function Systems [1:45 - 3:30 pm]
Cloth Simulation on the GPU [1:45 - 3:30 pm]

Courses

Performance OpenGL: Platform Independent Techniques [Monday, Aug. 1, 8:30 am - 12:15 pm]
GPU Shading and Rendering [Wednesday, Aug. 3, 8:30 am - 5:30 pm]
GPGPU: General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware [Wed., Aug. 3, 8:30 am - 5:30 pm]

NVIDIA SDK 9.5 Now Available

The NVIDIA SDK includes hundreds of code samples, effects, and helpful libraries to help you take advantage of the latest in GPU technology. This latest release includes short video clips for selected samples and effects, as well as:

SLI Best Practices code sample
Transparency Antialiasing code sample
GPU video and effects using shaders
Percentage Closer Soft Shadows effect
Dozens of new and updated effects for shadows, image processing, visual debugging, and more
Image processing code samples showing how to do convolutions, compositing, discrete cosine transforms, and more
Computing image histograms using occlusion queries

Convolution Filters Sample Released

This example shows various methods of implementing convolution filters in OpenGL using Cg. It supports both 1D separable filters (such as Gaussian blur) and 2D filters (such as disc blurs). The code shows how to take advantage of bilinear texture filtering so that only half the usual number of texture samples are required for separable filters. It also demonstrates how to implement steerable filters, where the width of the filter can vary from pixel to pixel.

Transparency AA Sample, Whitepaper, and Video Released

This sample demonstrates the GeForce 7 Series per-primitive super-sample and multi-sample modes for antialiasing primitives with transparent fragments. Source code and binaries are included, as well as a whitepaper and a short video clip.

GPU Programming Guide Updated

This minor update of our GPU Programming Guide includes new information about the GeForce 7 Series as well as transparency antialiasing.

NVMeshMender User Guide

We've released a short user guide for our NVMeshMender library. The guide covers what the library takes as input, what it outputs, describes the interface, and more.

NVPerfHUD 3.1 Available

This release includes fixes for a bugs reported by developers, including:

Vertex shader constants are now reported correctly in all cases
The “NVIDIA NVPerfHUD” adapter is now available on all NVIDIA GPUs

Please see the Release Notes and User Guide for full details.

IMG Awards

The International Mobile Gaming (IMG) Awards is an initiative of NVIDIA, the worldwide leader in graphics and digital media processors. The objective of the IMG Awards is to create a new and exciting set of awards to recognise the world’s most talented mobile game developers, whether they are from professional studios, universities or even back bedrooms! Click here to learn more.

NVShaderPerf 1.8 Released

This latest version of NVShaderPerf features:

Support for ForceWare 77.72 display drivers and latest Unified Compiler.
Support for GeForce 7800 GTX and other recently released GPUs.
Added the option to take the most/least expensive path for shaders that use conditional branching. Metrics for the most expensive path are reported by default. Metrics for the least expensive path are displayed when the -minbranch flag is specified.

NVIDIA OpenGL 2.0 Support Release Notes

These release notes explain NVIDIA’s support for OpenGL 2.0. These notes are written mainly for OpenGL programmers writing OpenGL 2.0 applications. These notes may also be useful for OpenGL-savvy end-users seeking to understand the OpenGL 2.0 capabilities of NVIDIA GPUs.

"Let's Get Small" Presentation Posted

This presentation talks all about mipmapping, explaning how the process works and how to make full use of it. It also includes discussions on how mipmapping affects different kinds of textures, such as bump maps, normal maps, and color maps, advice on how to use mipmapping effectively in your authoring pipeline, and much more.

Developer Technology Group Job Openings

Our Developer Technology group is looking for engineers who are passionate about 3D graphics and high-performance GPUs. If you fit the description below, please send us your resume.

Position: Developer Technology Engineer(s) [Location: U.S., Europe, or Asia-Pacific]

Cg 1.4 RC1 Released

This release candidate build of Cg 1.4 includes several new features and improvements:

Significantly improved code generation in most profiles
Complete rewrite of CgFX. CgFX now works on all platforms, and works on non-NVIDIA OpenGL drivers. Substantial documentation for CgFX will be coming in a subsequent build of Cg 1.4
Native implementations for Win32, Win64, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit), and Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) and 10.4 (Tiger)

NVPerfHUD 3 User Guide and Quick Reference Card Translated

The NVPerfHUD 3 User Guide and Quick Reference Card are now available in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

NVIDIA Melody 1.2 Now Available

Melody now supports generating normal maps from much larger models than ever before. Check out the latest release and updated User Guide for tips and tricks that will help you get the most from automatically generated normal maps.

NVIDIA Plug-ins for Adobe® Photoshop® and More

The installer now includes two new scripts for Adobe Photoshop. Mipster is a mip-map generation tool that leverages the power of the Photoshop CS2 internal image filtering engine along with the NVIDIA DDS Plug-in and Normal Map Filter. The Cube Map Shuffler script rearranges cube-map-face elements for use with different export and editing tools. It can quickly convert and copy between different cubemap layout formats, a task that has previously been annoyingly slow and error-prone. Updated version of both the Normal Map Filter and DDS Plug-in are also in this release.

NVIDIA DDS Utilities Now Support Larger Textures at Higher Quality

The latest release of nvDXT and related utilities now perform all internal calculations using floating point arithmetic, resulting in higher quality textures. They now support texture sizes up to 8k by 4K, and support for DXT5_NM (compressed normal maps) has been added. If you haven't updated your NVIDIA DDS Utilities for a while, now is the time!

NVPerfHUD 3 Review on GameDev.net

GameDev.net has published a review describing all the new features we've added to NVPerfHUD 3. They report that "[Frame Analysis Mode] is by far the most impressive mode of NVPerfHUD. ... A few moments in this mode does more to show how advanced graphic pipelines work than anything else I have seen. ... NVPerfHUD should be of interest to anybody who develops software that employs DirectX graphics."

NVPerfHUD 3.0 Available Now

There are so many new features in NVPerfHUD 3 that we introduced three separate modes to hold them all! Use the new Frame Analysis mode to freeze your application and single-step though a frame, drilling down into each draw primitive call to get advanced details about what is going on at each stage in your graphics pipeline. The new Debug Console mode shows you the DirectX Debug Runtime messages, warnings from NVPerfHUD, and custom messages from your application. And, of course, the powerful pipeline analysis experiments are still available in Performance Analysis mode.

We have also produced an NVPerfHUD 3 Overview video that describes all of NVPerfHUD's key features in detail.

NVIDIA Developers: Upgrade Your PC Today

Now more than ever, being an NVIDIA developer has its privileges. The Developer Relations team recently worked with Dell to get an amazing deal on a number of Dell Dimension XPS Gen4 Gaming PCs for use at E3 2005. Now that the show is over we're offering up this E3 System Special to our entire developer community for an amazing price. Interested? Click here for full details.

Image Processing on the GPU

Our Image Processing on the GPU whitepaper describes the basic methods of GPU usage for image processing and provides useful pointers to documentation, demo programs, and other developer tools.

FX Composer 1.7 Released

This release of FX Composer includes several minor bug fixes and installer updates. It has also been updated to support the Microsoft DirectX SDK April 2005 Update, so you can start using the latest HLSL compiler and FX framework with FX Composer now.

Developer Newsletter #27 Now Available in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean

The latest developer newsletter is 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.

NVIDIA SDK 9.1 Released

The NVIDIA SDK includes hundreds of code samples, effects, and libraries to help you take advantage of the latest in graphics technology. This release includes several new code samples, bug fixes and improved documentation:

GPU video and effects using shaders
Image processing using discreet cosine transforms on the GPU
Computing image histograms using occlusion queries

GPU Gems 2 Reviewed on Slashdot

An independent review of our latest book, GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation, is now available on Slashdot.

You can also find Slashdot reviews of our previous books, GPU Gems: Programming Techniques, Tips, and Tricks for Real-Time Graphics and The Cg Tutorial: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Programmable Graphics.

Non-Power-of-Two Mipmap Creation Whitepaper

This whitepaper explains the intricacies of creating mipmaps for non-power-of-two (NP2) textures.

Developer Newsletter #26 Now Available in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean

I3D Course Presentations Posted

Our course presentations from the recent ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games have now been posted. Also included are new movies of the soft shadow and cloth simulation algorithms that were presented.

Developer Newsletter #25 Now Available in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean

Last month's developer newsletter is 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.

GPU Gems 2 CD Content Released

The CD content from GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation is now freely available online. It includes numerous code samples, shaders, and standalone demos for many of the book's chapters.

Updated Device ID List Posted

Device IDs allow your application to determine what GPU it's running on. We provide a complete list of device IDs for current and past GPUs as well as code samples that illustrate how to use the list.

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GDC 2005 Sponsored Sessions Audio and Slides Available

Synchronized slides and audio from our sponsored sessions at GDC 2005 are now available. You can view them directly from the web, or download a ZIP file for each presentation. In addition, there is a ZIP file of all the slides and audio for your convenience.

NVIDIA Texture Tools Updated

Our NVIDIA Texture Tools Suite has been updated with new versions of the DDS Utilities and Adobe Photoshop Normal Map plug-in. The updates now includes full fp32 support for all processing, gamma support, and the ability to extract height from normal maps.

gDEBugger: An OpenGL Debugger and Profiler

Thanks to our friends at Graphic Remedy for showing their awesome gDEBugger tool at our GDC booth. gDEBugger traces application activity on top of OpenGL to provide the information you need to find bugs and to optimize application performance. It also includes many special graphics-related features such as the ability to view render context state variables, view allocated textures properties and image data, break on OpenGL errors, put breakpoints on OpenGL or extensions functions, view the application call stack and source code, and much more. For everyone who has been asking about NVPerfHUD for OpenGL, you're going to love gDEBugger. Check out the free 30 day trial.

GPU Gems 2 Now Available for Purchase

GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation was released recently at the Game Developers Conference 2005, where it was the bestselling book of the show. GPU Gems 2 is now available for purchase on several web sites:

You may also be interested in the first GPU Gems (now available in Japanese and Chinese), as well as The Cg Tutorial (now available in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Polish).

The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture Chapter Released

Excerpted from GPU Gems 2, The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture (Chapter 30) describes the architecture of the GeForce 6 Series family of GPUs, including details on the overall system architecture, vertex processor, fragment processor, and various other features.

GDC 2005 Presentations Posted

NVIDIA engineers gave more than 20 talks at the recent Game Developers Conference, and the talks are now available online. If you want to get everything at once, we have a convenient 41 MB ZIP file for you.

NVSG 1.0.11.4 is Now Available

This new version includes support for Linux 64-bit, mirror transform handling, support for .png, .gif, and fixed color index formats, texgen support, and other bug fixes and improvements.

GPU Gems 2 Sample Chapter #3 Now Available

A third GPU Gems 2 sample chapter, Dynamic Ambient Occlusion and Indirect Lighting (Chapter 14), is now available. This chapter describes how to add realism to animated characters by computing diffuse light transfer efficiently using the GPU. Learn more about GPU Gems 2 at the "GPU Gems 2 Showcase", part of our day of sponsored sessions (Wednesday) at GDC 2005. As usual, there will be prizes (graphics cards and books) for sessions attendees, so don't miss out on a chance to win while learning!

Floating-Point Specials

Floating-point math sometimes results in the generation of floating-point specials (such as NaNs and Infs) on CPUs as well as on GPUs. These special numbers often result in unintuitive rendering results that are hard to debug.

Floating-Point Specials describes when floating-point specials are generated in various stages of a modern GPU pipeline, and discusses methods for handling and protecting against these situations.

GPU Gems 2 Sample Chapter #2 Released

A second GPU Gems 2 sample chapter, Streaming Architectures and Technology Trends (Chapter 29), is now available. The first sample chapter, Per-Pixel Displacement with Distance Functions (Chapter 8) was released last week.

GPU Gems 2 Sample Material Released

Several pieces of sample material from the upcoming GPU Gems 2 book have been released. These include a Visual Table of Contents (shown at right, which will be inside the front cover), the foreword (by Tim Sweeney, Epic Games), the preface, and the contributor biographies.

NVIDIA Sessions at GDC 2005

Our Developer Technology team will be heavily involved at the upcoming Game Developers Conference, presenting at a number of sessions, including the Advanced Visual Effects with Direct3D Full-Day Tutorial, the Next-Generation Rendering with OpenGL Full-Day Tutorial, and five NVIDIA Sponsored Sessions on Wednesday, March 9.

NVShaderPerf for Forceware 71.80 Drivers Released

This latest version of the NVShaderPerf command-line utility uses the same technology as the Shader Perf panel in FX Composer to report shader performance metrics for Forceware 71.80 drivers.

SDK 8.5 Released

This release of the NVIDIA SDK includes hundreds of code samples, effects, and libraries to help you take advantage of the latest in graphics technology.

New in this release: HDR using 2x fp16 render targets, DXSAS implementation, GPU video filtering, PBO texture performance analysis, relief mapping, dozens of new HLSL FX examples for FX Composer and more... The code samples also include Shader Model 3.0 examples, High Dynamic Range Rendering, Deferred Shading, Instancing, Multiple Render Targets, Vertex Texturing, Soft Shadows, Perspective Shadow Maps, and many more.

The FX Composer effects include Flame, Glow, Gooch Shading, Metals, Multitexture-Based BRDFs, Color Controls, a selection of Image Filters, and much more.

NVIDIA GPU Programming Guide Now Available in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean

We have translated the NVIDIA GPU Programming Guide into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This document provides useful advice on how to identify bottlenecks in your applications, as well as how to eliminate them by taking advantage of the Quadro FX, GeForce 6 Series, and GeForce FX families' features.

If you have corrections or suggestions, please send them to devsupport@nvidia.com with TRANSLATION in the subject line.

GPU Gems 2 Coming Soon

GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation, published by Addison-Wesley, is a compilation of chapters covering the latest programming techniques for today’s graphics processing units (GPUs). Real-time graphics programmers will discover the latest algorithms for creating advanced visual effects, strategies for managing complex scenes, and techniques for advanced image processing. Readers will also learn new methods for using the substantial processing power of the GPU in other computationally intensive applications, such as scientific computing and finance.

GPU Gems 2 is hard bound, approximately 800 pages, and in full color throughout, with over 300 diagrams and screenshots. It will be released at the upcoming Game Developers Conference (March 7 - 11, 2005). You can sign up to be notified when the book is available.

Cg 1.3 Released

This 1.3 release of Cg introduces several significant new features:

New 'vp40' profile, that enables texture sampling from within vertex programs
New 'fp40' profile, that 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.
(New in Cg 1.2.1) The 'arbfp1' profile will attempt to generate code differently if the 'MaxTexIndirections' option is set to some non-zero value.

NVIDIA Wins Front Line Awards

Game Developer Magazine has announced that NVIDIA SDK 8.0 and our GPU Gems book have both won prestigious Front Line Awards. These awards recognize products that enable faster and more efficient game development, advancing the state of the art. Several NVIDIA products received honors:

NVIDIA SDK 8.0 (Programming) - Winner
GPU Gems (Books) - Winner
FX Composer (Art Tools) - Finalist
GeForce 6800 (Hardware) - Finalist

FX Composer 1.6 Released

FX Composer 1.6 supports the following new features:

Shader Model 3.0 support
Compatible with Microsoft DirectX preview pipeline
Supports Microsoft DirectX Standard Semantics & Annotations Specification (DXSAS)
FX Composer SDK examples show how you can import custom file formats, create automation scripts, and more
ShaderPerf updates supporting vertex shader analysis and GeForce 6 Series GPUs

NVShaderPerf Updated

The latest version of NVShaderPerf supports ForceWare drivers 66.93 and shaders written in Cg.

NVIDIA OpenGL Texture Formats

We've put together a convenient list of all supported OpenGL texture formats for each generation of NVIDIA GPUs. The list starts from NV4 (TNT-class GPUs) and works all the way up to the latest NV4X (GeForce 6 Series) family.

NVSG SDK 1.0.11.3 Released

This latest version of the NVSG (NVIDIA Scene Graph) SDK includes Linux support, improved locking performance, and numerous bug fixes and improvements.

Front Line Award Nominations

Game Developer Magazine has selected several NVIDIA products as finalists for the prestigious Front Line Awards. These awards recognize products that enable faster and more efficient game development, advancing the state of the art. The finalists are:

GeForce 6800 (Hardware)
NVIDIA SDK 8.0 (Programming)
FX Composer (Art Tools)
GPU Gems (Books)

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.

GPU Programming Guide Updated

The NVIDIA GPU Programming Guide has been updated with ps_3_0 performance advice, normal mapping advice, and a new "General Advice" chapter, as well as numerous tweaks and fixes. The latest version also includes links in the PDF, making it easier to access referred documentation and code samples.

NVIDIA Developer Tools Survey

We want to hear from developers about the things NVIDIA can do to help you 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.

Two GPU Gems Sample Chapters Released

Graphics Pipeline Performance and Perspective Shadow Maps: Care and Feeding are now freely available for download. Both chapters are excerpted from GPU Gems: Programming Techniques, Tips, and Tricks for Real-Time Graphics.

GPU Jackpot 2004 Presentations Posted

Selected presentations from both the Programmer and Artist tracks at GPU Jackpot 2004 are now available. The talks cover a wide range of topics including GPU performance tools, SLI, stereo, high dynamic range, shadow mapping techniques, modeling and texturing, cinematic effects, and more.

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.

SIGGRAPH 2004 Videos Now Available

The videos from three of our SIGGRAPH 2004 sessions (Shader Model 3.0 Unleashed, Transforming Production Workflows with the GPU, and Image Processing on the GPU) are now available. We apologize for the delay in posting these.

NVemulate Released

NVemulate allows you to emulate the functionality of various GPUs (very slowly) in software. In addition, this latest version allows you to control GLSL support. For more information, please read our GLSL release notes.

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