Last Updated:
07
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17
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2008
NVIDIA Developer Newsletter #40 - June 2008
In This Issue:
Summer is almost upon us, and spring has certainly
been a season of growth here at NVIDIA. We're happy to share new software tools from both NVIDIA and our partners; new documentation; even two contests: one for CUDA Programmers, and a chance for any reader to answer
our survey to win a new
high-performace NVIDIA GPU!
On the subject of contests, we're delighted to congratulate developer Mark Davis
of Novalogic, the winner of last month's
contest. We've sent Mark a shiny new NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 graphics
card as his prize from May's Newsletter Mini-Survey.
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
Game Developer Program will bring together new technologies (some never
presented before anywhere) into a single venue for the first time.
In your "off duty" hours, you can also compete for hundreds of
thousands of dollars in cash and prizes at GeForce LAN, the legendary
LAN party five years in the making, or at NVScene, an unprecedented
largest-ever gathering of creative minds in demoscene, machinima, game
modding, and digital art on US soil.
NVISION features numerous technical sessions, here's a list of those we've
chosen with special interest to game developers:
- 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 Johnson, 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
- Developer Tools Lunch Roundtable
- Sebastien Domine, Randy Fernando, Daniel Horowitz, and Jeffrey
Kiel, NVIDIA
Follow this
link for registration and schedule info.
URL: http://www.nvision2008.com/Professionals/game.cfm
Encoding MP3s always seem to take longer than it should. Do you wish you
could find a way to make the process run faster?
Now there is a way -- you can compete to write a simple code that will
speed up MP3 encoding on a CUDA-enabled
GPU, and the winner will receive a US$5,000.00 cash prize.
Check out the current CUDA
Coding Contest featuring a modified MP3 LAME Encoder (NVIDIA
supplies the initial "starting gate" code). Sign up and show us your
coding skills, and you can enter for a chance to win some cash.
URL: http://cudacontest.nvidia.com/
Check out the latest PerfHUD 6 Beta at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/perfhud6_beta.html
PerfHUD 6.0 includes many new features:
- Supports GeForce 8 and 9 GPUs
- SLI Support
- Texture Visualization and Overrides
- API Call List
- Draw Call Dependency View
- New CPU/GPU Timing graph
- Instant Feedback (Hit F4 in PerfHUD to send comments/suggestions
directly to the PerfHUD team)
- And more!
Of course, just as in prior versions, PerfHUD 6.0 Beta includes three
powerful analysis modes:
- The Performance Dashboard, for monitoring your GPU usage in real-time.
- The Frame Debugger, for examining the data associated with every draw
call in your frame.
- The Frame Profiler, an automated analysis mode that profiles your
application on a draw call level.
Browse over to our Beta page to download the PerfHUD installer, and get documentation.
Also, don't miss our video screencasts for PerfHUD 6:
URL: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/perfhud6_beta.html
Users of Autodesk Max and Maya have two newly-updated downloadable plugins
available for use with NVIDIA’s PhysX
physics SDK. These plugin downloads include full source and
user guides.
The PhysX Plugin for Max
has been upgraded to version 1.0.3 and provides support for Max9/Max2008/Max2009
with NVIDIA PhysX SDK 2.7.3, 2.8.0, and 2.8.1.
The "Nima" plugin for Maya
V1.04 update provides Maya2008 support for PhysX SDK 2.8.0.
URLs:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/physxplugin/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nimaplugin/
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/physx.html
On May 28th, NVIDIA and NaturalMotion Ltd, the
developers behind the highly acclaimed euphoria
motion synthesis technology, announced a strategic partnership that
will offer game developers and publishers tightly integrated animation
and physics solutions.
Starting with the upcoming release of NaturalMotion’s morpheme
animation engine, NVIDIA’s PhysX
technology will provide rigid body dynamics functionality across
NaturalMotion’s product portfolio, supporting both console (PS3, Xbox
360 and Wii) and PC platforms. In addition, PC titles will benefit from
GeForce GPU acceleration for both PhysX and future versions of
morpheme, bringing additional motion fidelity to the PC game
experience.
URLs:
http://www.naturalmotion.com/
http://www.naturalmotion.com/news.htm
http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm
http://www.naturalmotion.com/morpheme.htm
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/physx.html
As we announced in the May
Newsletter, NVIDIA, in conjunction with publisher Addison-Wesley, has begun the
process of making some of the very best GPU information and
documentation available online -- for free!
During the week of May 12, we began serializing
chapters of GPU Gems II, with new chapters available each week.
Visit the NVIDIA Developer
Site for all the details.
We've already serialized the entirety of GPU Gems 2 Part I: "Geometric
Complexity" and we're already well into the next section, "Shading,
Lighting, and Shadows." Here are the chapters available so far:
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 year's SIGGRAPH will
again see NVIDIA
presenting leading-edge development work on topics ranging from
character animation, rendering, CUDA High-Performance Computing, 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.
This year's NVIDIA SIGGRAPH talks on Wednesday are:
- 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.
In addition to these standard-program talks:
- Image-Space Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion
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
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
In each NVIDIA Developer Newsletter, we ask you to tell us what to do --
by asking a few select questions of our readers. Answer soon and you could be the
winner of a new high-end NVIDIA GeForce Graphics Card.
This month's mini-survey topic: NVIDIA
Web Services for Developers
This offer is open only to newsletter readers. Be sure to have your
answers in no later than the deadline: Monday, 9 June 2008.
URL: [survey closed]
If you prefer not to receive the NVIDIA Developer Newsletter in the future,
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NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) is the worldwide leader in graphics
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NVIDIA please visit our website: www.nvidia.com.
© 2008 NVIDIA Corporation
