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New NVIDIA Tools Accelerate Game Development

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02.08.2007
NVIDIA, the World’s Leading Manufacturer of Graphics and Media Processors, Has Released the Two New Software Tools FX Composer 2 and PerfKit 5. They Are Available as Free Downloads and Enable the Development of Visual Effects as Well as Performance Tuning for 3D Games and Other Real-Time Applications.

Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 2, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

FX Composer 2 is an integrated development environment for shader authoring that enables the rapid development of real-time visual effects for HLSL, COLLADA FX Cg and CgFX in DirectX and OpenGL. Among other things, FX Composer 2 offers Shader Library Integration, ShaderPerf analyses as well as support for animations, COLLADA and Microsoft XNA. In addition, there are scripting, effects and project wizards as well as customisable toolbars and layouts. Furthermore, FX Composer supports platforms such as Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Windows.

FX Composer 2 also includes “mental mill Artist Edition” from the company mental images, with which users can create shaders visually. Users can then import the shaders into FX Composer and apply them to real geometries for more complex calculations. FX Composer 2 is now available as a free download at http://developer.nvidia.com/FXComposer.

Electronics Art, which was honoured with numerous awards for its rendering technologies in the film hit “The Matrix”, relies on FX Composer 2. George Borshukov, CG Supervisor, says: “FX Composer 2 enables us to create complex rendering prototypes – and with unique results. No other solution offers us these capabilities and ease of use.”

NVIDIA’s second new solution, PerfKit 5, is a complete performance toolkit for real-time games and applications that now also supports Microsoft Windows Vista and DirectX 10. A central component of PerfKit 5 is PerfHUD 5, a heads-up display for DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 applications that enables interactive debugging and profiling in real time. This puts developers in a position to monitor GPU signals and debug frames and automatically analyse frames in order to track down performance bottlenecks.

The features of PerfHUD 5:

  • Support for DirectX 10, Microsoft Windows Vista and NVIDIA’s GeForce 8 GPU series
  • Shader Edit-and-Continue
  • More GPU and driver counters

  • More user-friendly layout

PerfHUD 5 was used, among other things, in the development of “Unreal Tournament 3”: “We used PerfHUD to optimise ‚Unreal Tournament 3′,” says Daniel Wright, Engine Programmer at Epic Games. “The Frame Debugger finds rendering problems quickly, and the Frame Profiler is an excellent tool for quickly identifying performance bottlenecks. PerfHUD’s real-time interaction with our engine gives us short iteration times that are business-critical for us.”

PerfKit 5 is likewise available as a free download at http://developer.nvidia.com/PerfKit.

Other development tools from NVIDIA are:

  • SDK 10: New code samples for DirectX 10, OpenGL and CUDA as well as current GPUs
  • Texture tools: Libraries and plug-ins for working with textures that now also support DirectX 10 and work ten times faster than before

  • ShaderPerf2: detailed shader information with support for new drivers

  • Shader Library: the world’s largest collection of GPU shaders with over 100 different shader effects and support for external contributions.

    • All these tools are available at http://developer.nvidia.com.

    FX_Composer2 prev.jpg: FX Composer 2 is an integrated development environment for shader authoring and allows the development of real-time visual effects. In the screenshot: A complex scene with different materials, animations, scripting, shadows and High Dynamic Range Color Picker.

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