Last Updated: 08 / 25 / 2009

NVIDIA® SceniX™ scene management engine

Note: For the latest news about SceniX or other applicaiton acceleration engines, subscribe to our Developer RSS feed or follow nvidiadeveloper on Twitter.

NVSG Archives The SceniX engine (previously termed the NVIDIA Scene Graph or NVSG) is an established solution in its fifth release as a cross-platform, object-oriented programming solution for software developers to quickly create interactive OpenGL applications having the highest degree of interactive performance and realism. Unlike most scene graphs, SceniX was designed around shader usage for applications requiring high image quality and the flexibility to share shaders via CgFX.

The SceniX engine quietly powers many of the most demanding 3D graphics applications in use today, and is freely available for incorporation within your OpenGL applications on either Windows or Linux. Version 5 enables existing and new SceniX applications to quickly take advantage of:

Faster Performance – twice as many frames per second in many cases than version 4.
Cg 2.2 support – enabling the latest rendering capabilities, performance gains, and optimal profiles for the latest NVIDIA GPUs.
Distributed GPU Rendering– enabling scene size to scale across Quadro Plex GPUs
MetaSL support – for leveraging shaders created within mental mill®.
10-bit/component color support – for superior image quality on compatible hardware.
Stencil Buffer support – enabling stencil buffer operations to occur per drawable object.

SceniX has proven to be a reliable underpinning for applications serving markets needing to analyze 3D data, make decisions, and convey design in real-time, such as Styling, Visualization, Retail, and Broadcast Graphics. The engine is extensively documented and provides a comprehensive set of classes that are easily combined and extended to create custom, GPU-centric graphics applications. SceniX also includes a sample viewer application and numerous tutorials, with source code, to learn how to use SceniX features quickly and effectively. A complete list of SceniX capabilities is available here.

Interactive Ray Tracing – Coming Soon

An interim version of SceniX will be released early this autumn with a new traverser for interactive ray tracing that is based upon the soon to be released NVIDIA® OptiX™ ray tracing engine. SceniX based applications will be able to quickly enable interactive ray tracing by adopting the upcoming version and enabling the feature.

SDK Sample Content

Within NVIDIA SceniX you will find numerous sample applications, including the SceniX Viewer which demonstrates nearly all the possibilities of the SDK. NVSG capabilities can be examined within the SceniX Viewer by exploring scenes imported from COLLADA, OBJ, VRML or OpenFlight formats. Also included are samples for integrating physics, audio, stereo, skinning, animation playback, frame-based rendering, and cluster integration.