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Last Updated:
02
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07
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2008
NVIDIA Developer Newsletter #38: GDC 2008 Edition 
In This GDC 2008 Special Edition
NVIDIA Presentations at GDC 2008
 NVIDIA developers will be presenting once again at this year's GDC in San Francisco. This is your chance to see new material directly from the same team that brought you the Frontline Award Winning GPU Gems series.
As in GDCs past, we'll also be entering the attendees of each sponsored talk into a per-session drawing for one of NVIDIA's latest high-performance GPU's. So come by, learn something, and maybe walk away with a new GeForce 8800!
- Advanced Skin Rendering in NVIDIA's Human Head Demo
4:00-5:00 pm, Room 3003 (West Hall), Wednesday, Feb. 20
Speaker: Eugene D'Eon
- Rendering realistic human skin represents one of the toughest challenges in computer graphics. In this session, attendees will learn about an extremely realistic, physically-based real-time skin shader that is easy to implement and highly scalable for optimal performance.
- Particle-based Fluid Simulation For Games
9:00-9:30 am, Room 3003 (West Hall), Thursday, Feb. 21
Speaker: Simon Green
 The computational power of modern GPUs has reached the point where realistic free-flowing fluids can be simulated and rendered in real-time. This talk will provide an overview of fluid simulation techniques for games and then describe in detail the advantages of particle-based simulations and how they can be implemented efficiently on the GPU.
- 3D Stereoscopic Game Development - How to Make Your Game Look Like Beowulf 3D
9:30-10:00 am, Room 3003 (West Hall), Thursday, Feb. 21
Speaker: Slava Gostrenko
- 3D stereoscopic movies - such as Beowulf 3D and U2 3D - are the cutting edge of immersive entertainment experiences by putting the viewers directly in the movie. Consumers will expect the same from their 3D games and applications. This talk will cover equipment, software, setup, and configuration, including an overview of NVIDIA's 3D stereo mode implementation. Attendees will learn guidelines for maximizing the 3D stereo effect, going over what works well, and what does not.
- GPU Optimization with the Latest NVIDIA Performance Tools
10:30-11:30 am, Room 3003 (West Hall), Thursday, Feb. 21
Speaker: Jeffrey Kiel
- Find out how to take full advantage of your GPU using NVIDIA's suite of GPU performance analysis tools for both DirectX and OpenGL. Attendees will learn how to measure and correct GPU bottlenecks with the latest PerfHUD, and to query performance counters with PerfSDK. The talk will also include an independent real-world case study from a popular shipping game.
- NVIDIA FX Composer 2: Shader Development Unleashed
12:00-1:00 pm, Room 3003 (West Hall), Thursday, Feb. 21
Speakers: Philippe Rollin & Aravind Kalaiah
- FX Composer 2 is a comprehensive shader development environment for programmers, artists, and technical directors that supports DirectX and OpenGL, and HLSL, Cg, and COLLADA FX shaders. This session will highlight new features such as a source-level shader debugger for Cg and HLSL10 shaders, Direct3D 10 support including geometry shaders, and particle systems.
NVIDIA staff will also be giving other talks in different venues around GDC, including:
- Advanced Visual Effects with Direct 3D
10:00-18:00, Room 2007 (West Hall), Monday, Feb 18
NVIDIA Speakers: Ignacio Llamas, Louis Bavoil, Andrei Tatarinov
- Brought to you as the collaboration between the industry's leading hardware and software vendors, this day-long tutorial provides an in-depth look at the Direct3D technologies in DirectX 10 and how they can be applied to cutting-edge game graphics.
- Beyond Printf: Debugging Graphics Through Tools
12:00-1:00 pm, Room 131 (North Hall), Thursday, Feb. 21
Speakers: David Aronson, NVIDIA; Karen Stevens, Microsoft
- This presentation utilizes freely available products made by a variety of vendors and focuses on prioritizing tool selection and use.
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- Physics for Game Programmers
10:00-18:00, Room 2018 (West Hall), Tuesday, Feb 19
NVIDIA Speaker: Jim Van Verth
- NVIDIA and multiple game studios, will provide a toolbox of techniques for programmers interested in creating physics engines, with focus on various pieces of the simulation pipeline, and will show how problems along the way can be solved and optimized using standard concepts, know-how, and sample code.
For last-minute details, or to access extra materials after GDC, check out our GDC 2008 Developer Home Page.
NVIDIA Developer Tools Update
NVIDIA Shader Debugger
NVIDIA's developer tools are widely acknowledged as leaders for graphics production and exploration. Our suite of tools is continuously upgraded, and here are some new versions we'll be showing off at GDC:
- PerfHUD 6
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- SLI support
- Unified driver
- Advanced texture and render target analysis
- API data mining & analysis
- FX Composer 2.5
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- Full DirectX 10 shader authoring
- ShaderPerf 2.0 with GeForce 8 Series support
- Visual Models & Styles
- Particle Systems
- Support for MRTs
- NVIDIA Shader Debugger 1.0
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- Pixel Shader Debugging for HLSL10, CgFX, and COLLADA FX Cg
- Standard Debugging Functionality for Single and Multiple Pixels
- Integrated into FX Composer 2.5
- OpenGL SDK 10.5
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- ShaderPerf 2.0
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- Vertex shader analysis
- New G80 and driver support
- Texture Tools 2
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- Higher quality filtering for mipmap generation and image resizing
- Improved fast compression modes
- API finalized and frozen
- Cg 2.0 Toolkit
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- Full support for new OpenGL profiles (gp4vp, gp4gp, and gp4fp) for GeForce 8 extensions such as geometry shading, texture arrays, and first-class integer support
- Support for Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard"
- New DirectX 9 profiles (hlslv and hlslf) to cross-translate Cg to HLSL
- NVSG: NVIDIA Scene Graph SDK
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- Support for more file formats
- Support for FX Composer 2.5, Mental Mill, and Cg 2.0
- Extended animation and skinning support.
- Support for NVIDIA Quadro® HD SDI output.
Crysis running in PerfHUD 6.
Used with permission from Crytek.
© Crytek GmbH. All Rights Reserved.
Crysis and CryENGINE are trademarks or registered trademarks
of Crytek GmbH in the U.S and/or other countries.
For last-minute details, or to access extra materials after GDC, check out our GDC 2008 Tools Home Page.
Meet the NVIDIA Developer Tools Team
NVIDIA Booth | Wed - Fri | 2-3 pm | "GDC 2" Conference Room
Have a need we're not yet addressing, keen to get inside tips, or to just find out what's new at NVIDIA?
Representatives from our Developer Tools teams will be at the NVIDIA GDC Meeting Room 2 (Booth Number ES 658) daily during the exhibition, eager to listen to the development community about your needs and ideas. We're dedicated to giving developers the very best workflow and GPU development resources available anywhere.
Integrating Realistic Soft Shadows into Your Game Engine
This new whitepaper (PDF format) explains how to easily integrate an efficient method for creating realistic soft shadows, using either DirectX 10 and/or high-end DirectX 9 GPUs.
Image used with permission from
Flagship Studios.
Click for larger view.
The image above shows our technique implemented in the recently released game Hellgate: London, developed by Flagship Studios. Each character's shadow varies in softness depending on the character's spatial relationship to the ground.
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