NVIDIA Launches GameWorks SDK 3.1

[Cristian_25H]

NVIDIA today announced worldwide availability of the NVIDIA GameWorks software development kit (SDK) 3.1, which introduces three groundbreaking graphics techniques for shadows and lighting as well as two new physical simulation algorithms released as betas.

"It's our passion for gaming that drives us to tackle the technical problems presented by real-time rendering and simulation," said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA. "Our GameWorks technologies push the boundaries of what's possible in real time, enabling developers to ship their games with state of the art special effects and simulations."





The three new GameWorks rendering techniques for lighting and shadows include:

• NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting - an advanced lighting technique that simulates how light behaves as it scatters through the air and atmosphere. NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting was first introduced in the hit video game Fallout 4.
• NVIDIA Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows (HFTS) - an algorithm for drawing high-fidelity shadows that transition smoothly from hard shadows near the occluding object, to proper soft shadows in regions farther away. HFTS debuted in the hit video game Tom Clancy's The Division.
• NVIDIA Voxel Accelerated Ambient Occlusion (VXAO) - NVIDIA's highest quality algorithm for real-time ambient occlusion, VXAO is a shading technique that adds depth and realism to any scene. It surpasses older techniques by calculating shadows in world-space using all scene geometry, as opposed to screen space techniques that can only shadow from geometry visible to the camera. VXAO debuted in the hit video game Rise of the Tomb Raider.

The pair of extensions to the NVIDIA PhysX library include:

• NVIDIA PhysX-GRB - a new implementation of NVIDIA's popular PhysX rigid body dynamics SDK, which has been used in hundreds of games. This hybrid CPU/GPU physics pipeline improves performance by a factor of up to 6X for moderate to heavy simulation loads.
• NVIDIA Flow - a computational fluid dynamics algorithm that simulates and renders combustible fluids such as fire and smoke. Unlike previous methods, Flow isn't limited to simulation of the fluids inside a bounding box.

NVIDIA makes source code for select GameWorks libraries available to developers via GitHub. Source code for NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting and NVIDIA's FaceWorks demo is available today. Source code for NVIDIA HairWorks, NVIDIA HBAO+ and NVIDIA WaveWorks will be available soon.

More information on NVIDIA GameWorks is available at developer.nvidia.com.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Xzibit]

With its track record the SDK acronym should stand for

Slow
Down
Kit

 

[ZoneDymo]

man Frustum AND voxel??!!! :O
hell why not throw in floop di doop and smerk li berg as well

 

[Bansaku]

Version 3.1 of how to monopolize the market by punishing both AMD owners and poor saps who still own "last gen." Geforce cards.

 

[Patriot]

Gamebreaks 3.1

 

[efikkan]

Clueless people keep spreading the FUD...

And where would gaming be today without GameWorks? Even though GameWorks isn't perfect, there is still more good in there than "GPUOpen" provides.

 

[Patriot]

Clueless people keep spreading the FUD...

And where would gaming be today without GameWorks? Even though GameWorks isn't perfect, there is still more good in there than "GPUOpen" provides.

Speaking of fud... this post.... your eyes sir... they are brown and you smell of pasture.

 

[okidna]

Clueless people keep spreading the FUD...

And where would gaming be today without GameWorks? Even though GameWorks isn't perfect, there is still more good in there than "GPUOpen" provides.

I'm neutral towards GameWorks especially after recently NVIDIA starting to provide the source code of their implementation so developer could test and tweak the code to suit their own implementation.

But I don't agree with your statement about GPUOpen.
If you go to the Professional Compute section on GPUOpen website you will find a lot of frameworks and libraries to play with. It's not in the state-of-the-art library (and, especially, documentation wise) like CUDA, OpenCL, or PhysX provide but it's a good start and to see that AMD embracing and supporting more established frameworks and libraries (like CUDA, Caffe, or OpenVX) is encouraging and always a positive.

 

[efikkan]

Speaking of fud... this post.... your eyes sir... they are brown and you smell of pasture.

Then you'll should get a dictionary and look up what FUD actually means.

I'm neutral towards GameWorks especially after recently NVIDIA starting to provide the source code of their implementation so developer could test and tweak the code to suit their own implementation.

But I don't agree with your statement about GPUOpen.
If you go to the Professional Compute section on GPUOpen website you will find a lot of frameworks and libraries to play with. It's not in the state-of-the-art library (and, especially, documentation wise) like CUDA, OpenCL, or PhysX provide but it's a good start and to see that AMD embracing and supporting more established frameworks and libraries (like CUDA, Caffe, or OpenVX) is encouraging and always a positive.

Don't get me wrong, GPUOpen is nice but the selection of examples and libraries are sparse compared to GameWorks. For years Nvidia has provided the go-to place for quality updated tutorials for both Direct3D and OpenGL.

 

[HalfAHertz]

The tidbit from this news should be the fact that they're open-sourcing some of their libraries.

NVIDIA makes source code for select GameWorks libraries available to developers via GitHub. Source code for NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting and NVIDIA's FaceWorks demo is available today. Source code for NVIDIA HairWorks, NVIDIA HBAO+ and NVIDIA WaveWorks will be available soon.

 

[Patriot]

The tidbit from this news should be the fact that they're open-sourcing some of their libraries.

That should be up first and bolded... Considering it is a 180 from their recent cripple previous gen as a side effect of hurting AMD... the blackboxes were doing terrible things to AAA gameworks titles.

 

[Chaitanya]

So how long before the Ftc decides to investigate Gpu Nazi for unfair competition practices?

 

[TheGuruStud]

So how long before the Ftc decides to investigate Gpu Nazi for unfair competition practices?

It would be for show even if they did just like the intel case. 1 billion one time payout? That's about on par for banks laundering drug money and oil/coal companies for catastrophic enviromental disasters, but very anemic for the actual damage caused.

It's almost as bad as IA investigating police corruption.

They're all in on it. Throw some cash around the problem erodes.

 

[Prima.Vera]

S.D.K. - Slow Down Kitch ??

 

[john_]

Version 3.0 main feature

- Slows down Kepler

Version 3.1 main feature

- Slows down Maxwell

 

[Dimi]

No offense but every new tech is slowing down older tech. That has always been the case. I've been gaming for 25 years on PC and have not know it any other way. I'm surprised i can even get 3 years out of my mid range gpu's.

 

[Semel]

NVIDIA HairWorks,

Thanx but no thanx.

After seeing tressfx 3.0 in action (rise of the tomb raider) slowworks just needs to die.... performance difference is staggering..

 

[Death Star]

Oh joy, more proprietary nonsense.