Posts Tagged ‘graphics programming’

NVIDIA ForceWare 177.66: GeForce 8800 GTX OpenGL Extensions

[French]
Voici la liste des extensions OpenGL supportées par les pilotes Forceware 177.66 WinXP 32 pour une GeForce 8800 GTX.
[/French]

[English]
Here is the list of OpenGL extensions supported by Forceware 177.66 WinXP 32 drivers for a GeForce 8800 GTX.
[/English]

[French]Carte graphique utilisée[/French]
[English]Graphics card used[/English]: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX / 768Mb

- Drivers Version: Forceware 6.14.11.7766
- OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
- GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) Version: 1.20 NVIDIA via Cg compiler
- OpenGL Renderer: GeForce 8800 GTX/PCI/SSE2
- Drivers Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX

OpenGL Extensions: 161 extensions

[French]
Les extensions des anciens pilotes ForceWare se trouvent ICI.
[/French]
[English]
The extensions exposed by the old ForceWare drivers are HERE.
[/English]

Read more…

Arauna Ray Tracer

Arauna is a real-time ray tracer developed for game development. Being a real-time ray tracer, it is experimental, and does not yet deliver the performance needed to produce graphics of the same quality as modern games do using a GPU. However, in its class, it is one of the fastest (probably the fastest) renderer. Two games have been developed already using Arauna, both by students of the IGAD program of the NHTV University of Applied Sciences (Breda, The Netherlands).

More information and download HERE.

DirectX 11 to be discussed in just weeks!

Microsoft will start talking about DirectX 11 in less than two weeks. his conference takes place on the 22 and 23 July in Seattle, Washington.

The big feature of DirectX 11 is tessellation / displacement while we also heard that multithreaded rendering and compute shaders are part of it. DirectX 11 also brings shader model 5.0 but we don’t know many details about it.

It looks like DirectX 11 will stick to rasterization as there is no any mentioning of Ray tracing support.

-source-

FX Composer 2.5 Available!

FX Composer 2.5, the latest version of NVIDIA’s powerful shader development environment, has been released.

FX Composer supports DirectX, OpenGL, HLSL, Collada FX, and CgFX, as well as the .fbx, .x, .3ds, .obj, and .dae file formats for importing geometry.

Version 2.5 adds:
* DirectX 10 support, including geometry shaders and stream out
* Particle Systems
* Visual Styles
* Major User Interface Improvements
* Remote Control over TCP/IP
* Support for the NVIDIA Shader Debugger
* New Sample Projects

You can download FXC HERE – exe (221Mb).

Blink 3D 2.0 Virtual Worlds Development Platform Released

Practical Fluid Dynamics: Part 1

In this technical article originally printed in Game Developer magazine, Neversoft co-founder Mick West looks at how to efficiently implement fluid effects – from smoke to water and beyond – in video games, with example code.

Read the part 1 HERE.

Vision Engine 7

NVIDIA PerfHUD 6.0 Final Release Now Available!

NVIDIA PerfHUD is a powerful real-time performance analysis tool for Direct3D applications, and it is widely used by the world’s best game developers.

More info at NVIDIA PerfHUD homepage

PerfKit 6.0 New Feature Highlights:
* No longer requires an instrumented driver on Vista!
* Supports GeForce 8 and 9 GPUs
* SLI Support
* Texture Visualization and Overrides
* API Call List
* Dependency View
* New CPU/GPU Timing graph

Modernizing the Quake2 renderer

Jay Dolan recently blogged about some of the performance optimizations he made to his Quake2-based engine, Quake2World. He provides links to various points in the source code to give context around some of the topics he discusses.

Read the post HERE.

Quake2 was released in 1997. Hardware acceleration was only available on higher-end PC’s, and things like multitexture and vertex arrays which are commonplace today didn’t even exist then. So naturally, Quake2′s rendering techniques appear very dated in 2008. Multitexture was made a part of the OpenGL specification in version 1.2.1, and is available on most 2nd generation hardware (TNT or newer). I strongly recommend cleaning up the renderer and removing any non-multitexture rendering paths.
…
Texture binds (glBindTexture) are rather expensive too, and so to minimize these per frame, you should group the world surfaces by texture before iterating over them. Note that a simple grouping operation is significantly cheaper than a qsort — overall order is not important, we just want to minimize texture changes.

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OpenGL demos taking advantage of Shader Model 4

Naixela released two demos “geometry shader painterly rendering” and “geometry shader tessellation” taking advantage of Shader Model 4 (inclusive source code).

- Geometry Shader Painterly Rendering Demo
Renders a scene into color, position, and normal textures, and then outputs the scene as a large number of brush strokes covering the screen using the geometry shader.

- Geometry Shader Tessellation Demo
Tessellates a heightfield based on distance to the viewer using the geometry shader.

Catalyst 8.6: OpenGL Extensions – Radeon HD 3870

[French]
Tiens une nouveauté: il y a une extension en moins:
- GL_ARB_half_float_pixel

Carte graphique utilisée: Radeon HD 3870
[/French]

[English]
Ah ah, there is one extension in less in Cat8.6 in comparison of Cat8.5:
- GL_ARB_half_float_pixel

Graphics card used: Radeon HD 3870
[/English]
- Operating System: Windows XP SP2 32-bit
- Drivers Version: 8.501.0.0 – Catalyst 08.6
- ATI Catalyst Version String: 08.6
- ATI Catalyst Release Version String: 8.501-080602a-064783C-ATI
- OpenGL Version: 2.1.7659 Release
- GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) Version: 1.20

OpenGL Extensions: 102 extensions

[French]
Les extensions des anciens pilotes Catalyst se trouvent ICI.
Vous pouvez utiliser GPU Caps Viewer pour récupérer la liste des extensions de votre carte graphique.
[/French]
[English]
The extensions exposed by the old Catalyst drivers are HERE.
You can use GPU Caps Viewer to retrieve the list of extensions of your graphics card.
[/English]

Read more…

NVIDIA ShaderPerf 2

NVIDIA ShaderPerf is a command-line shader profiling utility and C API that reports detailed shader performance metrics for a wide range of GPUs.

ShaderPerf wokrs with GLSL vertex and fragment programs, HLSL vertex and pixel shaders and Cg shaders.

ShaderPerf 2.0 includes several new features:
* GeForce 8 series support
* Pixel Shader Differencing
* Vertex Shader Analysis

ShaderPerf outputs the following for any shader that you analyze:
* Cycle count
* Register usage
* Driver-optimized shader instruction list
* Vertex and pixel throughput estimates

More information and download HERE.

Read more…

OGRE 3D 1.4.9 Released

GLOBE_3D

FreeSpin3D Tutorial Update

Revolver has just released a new tutorial to back up its umlimited free support of its beta release. Check it out at HERE.