FX Composer is no longer in active development and will not receive any further updates. v2.5 is the final release of this product. Please refer to NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition for your shader debugging/profiling/authoring needs.

FX Composer 2.5 is a powerful integrated development environment for shader authoring. Features in this release include:

  • Major user interface improvements
  • DirectX 10 support, including geometry shaders and stream out.
  • Visual Styles - the ability to create, define, and export multiple looks for a model.
  • Particle systems
  • Support for the NVIDIA Shader Debugger
  • Remote control over TCP/IP
  • Unified Importing of Models
  • Improved Performance
  • And more!
Download NVIDIA FX Composer 2.5!
FX Composer 2.51 + Shader Debugger 2.51 Bundle

Note: mental mill Artist Edition is no longer bundled with FX Composer 2.5. The retail version of Mental Mill has been discontinued.

Screencasts

FX Composer 2.5 Overview

[Youtube] [MOV] [WMV]

FX Composer 2.5 New Features

[Youtube] [MOV] [WMV]

The FX Composer 350Z Sample Project

Key Features of FX Composer 2.5

Key Features of FX Composer 2.5Shader Creation Wizard

Key Features of FX Composer 2.5Visual Styles

Key Features of FX Composer 2.5Particle Systems

Key Features of FX Composer 2.5Integrated Shader Library

Key Features of FX Composer 2.5Texture Viewer

Key Features of FX Composer 2.5Shader Performance Analysis

  • Cross-API Support
    • New! DirectX 10
    • DirectX 9, and OpenGL
    • HLSL, COLLADA FX Cg, CgFX shading languages
  • New! Support for Shader Debugger plug-in
  • New! Particle Systems
  • New! Visual Styles
    • Ability to create, define, and export multiple looks for a model
  • New! Remote Control Service over TCP/IP
  • New! Shader Perf with GeForce 8 Series Support
  • New! Improved User Interface
    • Unified project model
    • Reduced user interface clutter
    • Single-device operation
    • Enlarged icons with captions
  • Shader Creation Wizard with templates
  • Full-featured Code Editor
    • New! Automatic, Customizable Code Snippets
    • Code folding for functions, techniques and passes
    • Tab stop display
    • Line number display
    • External file modification monitoring
    • Jump-to-include files
  • Properties panel for tweaking shader parameters
    • High dynamic range color picker
  • Material panel for managing materials
    • Display of per-material textures
    • Tone mapping for per-material textures
  • Easy material creation and management interface
  • Hundreds of sample shaders
    • NVIDIA Shader Library integration
    • Sample projects ranging from simple to complex
  • Advanced scene manipulation
    • Create and manipulate basic geometric shapes, lights, and cameras
    • Import .3ds, .fbx, .dae, .x, .obj files
    • Drag-and-drop light binding
    • Drag-and-drop texture binding
    • Skinning and animation
  • Texture Viewer
    • Support for .dds, .jpg, .bmp, .png, .tif
    • Drag-and-drop textures onto object materials
  • Convenient Start Page
    • Recent projects
    • Quick Start Tutorial
    • Quick links to User Guide and other useful documentation
    • Single-click access to open effects and create new ones
    • Single-click access to open COLLADA documents
  • Integrated Shader Performance Tuning via NVIDIA ShaderPerf 2.0
    • Support for CgFX, COLLADA FX, and HLSL shaders
    • Compare shader techniques across multiple GPUs
    • View data in tables or graphs
    • See shader throughput, register usage, instruction counts, and branching performance
  • Convenient Pipeline Integration Features
    • Semantic and Annotation remapping
    • Advanced Scripting Support
      • Full Python scripting
      • Custom toolbar for scripting support
    • Extensible plug-in Architecture with SDK
  • Complete COLLADA support
    • Project and Asset Management (Project Explorer and Library Viewer)
      • Author COLLADA assets
      • Create and remove COLLADA documents
      • Move, delete, and copy COLLADA assets across COLLADA documents
      • View COLLADA assets by category
    • COLLADA format support
      • Material Instance Scene Binding
      • Material Instance Vertex Binding
      • Skinning
      • Triangulation with holes
      • Support for rendering COMMON Profiles
      • Vertex Stream Remapper
    • Conversion of CgFX to COLLADA FX Cg
  • Comprehensive Undo/Redo support
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    • User Guide
    • Quick Tutorial