NVIDIA Developer Newsletter #43: NVISION 2008

In This Issue:

NVISION 2008 starts Monday! NVIDIA will be presenting new products, ideas, and partners across the entire range of visual and high-performance computing: from Formula 1 racing (both simulated and real) to space flight (both real and simulated).

• Event: Developer Events at NVISION 2008
• Software: NVIDIA Provides Immediate OpenGL 3.0 Support
• Contest: Dark Physics Contest Ends August 31st
• Book: GPU Gems 2 in Online Serialization
• Recap: NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2008

NVIDIA Developer Events at NVISION 2008

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 gamer events like the 2008 Electronic Sports World Cup, keynotes from industry luminaries, and an expo hall featuring leading visual computing companies, the Professional Developer Program will bring together 77 Hours of sessions on new technologies and ideas -- some never presented before anywhere -- into a single unified venue for developers of games, visualization, and CUDA applications.

Besides the Developer Workshop itself, while in your "off duty" hours at NVISION you can also compete for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and prizes at the GeForce LAN, the legendary LAN party five years in the making; or enjoy NVScene, an unprecedented largest-ever gathering of creative minds in demoscene, machinima, game modding, and digital art on US soil.

NVISION will offer both a technical program of talks and demonstrations along with special developer-oriented events for growing your business.

Developer Business Development Events:

Emerging Companies Summit

Graphics processors now help power applications such as Google Earth, 3D web applications and user interfaces, HD video playback, virtual worlds, and other lifestyle and web applications. In addition, GPUs are no longer needed just for graphics. They are now designed and used to accelerate high-performance computing applications ranging from financial market analyses, electromagnetic simulations, oil and gas exploration, and other scientific calculations.

The Emerging Companies Summit will showcase innovative companies who contribute to the broader ecosystems of visual and high performance computing. The event is sponsored by Cooley Godward Kronish, Ernst & Young, Morgan Stanley, RR Donnelley, and Sutter Hill Ventures and will be held at NVISION® 08.

Bundle Conference: NVIDIA's Second Bundle Event

The world's leading graphics cards makers, desktop and notebook PC makers, etailers and retailers are eager to learn how they can use "The Way It's Meant To Be Played™" games to help market and sell their GeForce powered hardware. They have requested the opportunity to meet with you, the world's leading game publishers and developers, to learn about your new titles for 2HY 2008 and 1HY 2009.

Rather than run a series of presentations, you asked that we focus our next event on the chance to meet one-on-one with each other. So for NVISION this will be a "Bundle Hour" (that actually lasts for 2 hours) which starts at 4PM at the The Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose.

Software developers should confirm your attendance and willingness to meet with the world's leading resellers and OEMs to Dave Edwards at NVIDIA via BundleEvent@nvidia.com. Attendees will be asked to wear clear name badges to facilitate easy introduction and there will be tables and seating for private discussion

Confirmed Guests at the Bundle Event Include:

• Acer
• ASUS
• Biostar
• Buy.com
• CyberPower
• Dell
• EVGA
• GIGABYTE
• iBUYPOWER
• Microcenter
• MSI
• NewEgg
• TigerDirect/CompUSA

RSVP Today!

NVISION Technical Program

The NVIDIA Developer Workshop features numerous technical sessions. Here's a list of those we've chosen with special interest to game developers. For a full list, click here.

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

Nadeem Mohammed, Jean Bordes, 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

Monier Maher, NVIDIA

Beautiful Women of the Future

Kevin Bjorke, NVIDIA

Shape of Things to Come: Next-Gen Physics Deep Dive

Jean Bordes, 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

Interactive Raytracing with CUDA

David Leubke and Steven Parker, NVIDIA

Follow this link for registration and schedule info.

URL: http://www.nvision2008.com/Professionals/game.cfm

NVIDIA Provides Immediate OpenGL Support

A SIGGRAPH 2008 bonus: immediate day-one support for the just-announced OpenGL 3.0 from NVIDIA's Windows drivers. See http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html for the details, along with the documentation for the new version of nvemulate, to be found at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvemulate.html

URLs:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvemulate.html

NVIDIA and The Game Creators PhysX Demo Contest: Almost Done!

http://physxcomp.thegamecreators.com/ is the address you'll need to try your hand at the Game Creators/PhysX game physics demo competition, and you'll need to move fast! While you can get a quick start from the free software and assets are provided, the deadline is quickly approaching: August 31st.

The competetion is really two contests in one: both a challenge to create new demos for specific features of the NVIDIA PhysX toolkit running within The Game Creator's Dark Physics software, and also a challenge to create an "Über demo" with the simple criterion: knock our socks off!

Prizes are being supplied by ASUS and EVGA.

See here for all the details, and here for downloadable software (including a complete Dark Physics package) and freely-available media files that you may use (or not) to build your winning demo!

URLs:
http://physxcomp.thegamecreators.com/
http://physxcomp.thegamecreators.com/details.html
http://physxcomp.thegamecreators.com/downloads.html
http://www.youtube.com/v/8uTBHyC4f94

GPU Gems 2 Continues in Online Serialization

We're almost to the end! NVIDIA, in conjunction with publisher Addison-Wesley, has been making some of the very best GPU information and documentation available online -- for free!

Here are the latest serialized chapters:

• GPU Flow-Control Idioms by Mark Harris of NVIDIA and Ian Buck of Stanford University
• GPU Program Optimization by Cliff Woolley of University of Virginia
• Stream Reduction Operations for GPGPU Applications by Daniel Horn of Stanford University
• Octree Textures on the GPU by Sylvain Lefebvre, Samuel Hornus, and Fabrice Neyret of GRAVIR/IMAG – INRIA
• High-Quality Global Illumination Rendering Using Rasterization by Toshiya Hachisuka of The University of Tokyo
• Global Illumination Using Progressive Refinement Radiosity by Greg Coombe of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Mark Harris of NVIDIA
• Computer Vision on the GPU by James Fung of University of Toronto

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

Recap: NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2008

Did you see it? NVIDIA's Interactive Raytracing Technology was the must see item of the Siggraph 2008 Exhibition Hall. It was accompanied by a host of other terrific applications demos from NVIDIA and our SIGGRAPH partners -- technology up and running today for tomorrow's applications.

We were also thrilled have standing-room-only crowds for our presentations in both the dedicated NVIDIA Tech Talk sessions and at our contibutions to the standard SIGGRAPH program. Thanks to all who attended!

Didn't get a chance to get to Los Angeles yourself? Don't fret, we will be providing web versions of key talks on our dedicated SIGGRAPH 2008 Page and you can keep up to date on all of our decumentation releases via our RSS Developer News Feed.

URLs:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/siggraph-2008.html
http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/
http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/attendees/techtalks/sessions.php
http://news.developer.nvidia.com/rss.xml

This month we're skipping the developer survey in favor of giving full focus to NVISION 2008. See you in San Jose!