Beyond3D - NVIDIA release Cg 2.1 Beta and Gamefest presentations

NVIDIA release Cg 2.1 Beta and Gamefest presentations

Saturday 09th August 2008, 11:44:00 AM, written by Rys

NVIDIA have released a new beta of Cg 2.1, and the highlight is the toolkit supporting Cg shader translation to D3D10 HLSL, letting your shaders run there. There's a new runtime lib for D3D10 to support that, doc updates and the usual performance improvements and bug fixes.

You can grab installers for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, along with the documentation and other goodies.

Meanwhile, the Gamefest slides talk about tesselation in D3D11, and using their PerfKit tools under D3D10.

We'll have a DirectX 11 early preview online in the next month or so, stay tuned.

Discuss on the forums

Tagging

nvidia ± developer, tools, gamefest, d3d11, d3d10

Latest Thread Comments (60 total)

Posted by Humus on Saturday, 08-Nov-08 17:21:59 UTC

Download link for the November SDK:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5493f76a-6d37-478d-ba17-28b1cca4865a&DisplayLang=en

Posted by Seth on Sunday, 23-Nov-08 17:46:15 UTC

Is everyone having fun with the D3D11 preview? I love it (except for the temporary lack of HW ;))!

I couldn't resist: http://reboot.zapto.org/cslife.png

Posted by Andrew Lauritzen on Sunday, 23-Nov-08 19:44:26 UTC

I haven't had time to play with it in depth yet, but I skimmed the documentation and looked at the samples.So does anyone know what this "WARP" thing is? It appears to be sold as a fast, multi-core D3D10.1 software rasterizer by the documentation, but I've not had time to play with it yet. Is this maybe targeted at fast desktop compositing for Vista and newer OSes on computers without dedicated graphics hardware? I'm assuming the performance still wouldn't be up to spec for any modern games, but I haven't had time to try it out. Anyone played with this yet?

Posted by Jawed on Sunday, 23-Nov-08 19:53:06 UTC

Quoting Andrew Lauritzen
So does anyone know what this "WARP" thing is? It appears to be sold as a fast, multi-core D3D10.1 software rasterizer by the documentation, but I've not had time to play with it yet. Is this maybe targeted at fast desktop compositing for Vista and newer OSes on computers without dedicated graphics hardware? I'm assuming the performance still wouldn't be up to spec for any modern games, but I haven't had time to try it out. Anyone played with this yet?

Yep, it's specifically intended to provide fully compliant rendering for anyone whose hardware isn't up to scratch. It was demonstrated at PDC, doing a globe of the Earth with normal mapping/specularity and other funky material properties at about 85fps if I remember right. Jawed

Posted by Demirug on Sunday, 23-Nov-08 20:05:49 UTC

I have run our upcoming game on it. On my dual core system it hardly reaches 8 FPS with everything set to low.

Overall it looks more like an emergency fallback for Direct2D and DirectWrite. Maybe it could be an interesting why to use the SSE calculation power of an multicore system by running GPGPU shader there.

Posted by Demirug on Monday, 24-Nov-08 17:46:33 UTC

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx

A whitepaper with some performances data.

Posted by pjbliverpool on Monday, 24-Nov-08 19:54:47 UTC

Quoting Demirug
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285359.aspx A whitepaper with some performances data.

Interesting numbers. They certainly highlight how far CPU's are from GPU performance at the moment. Even a Radeon 2400 Pro can run rings around 8 Nehalem cores at 3Ghz! I guess Crysis wasn't built with WARP10 in mind though. It would be interesting to see the results for a game that was.

Posted by Ateo on Tuesday, 25-Nov-08 06:04:37 UTC

Quoting pjbliverpool
Interesting numbers. They certainly highlight how far CPU's are from GPU performance at the moment.

Even a Radeon 2400 Pro can run rings around 8 Nehalem cores at 3Ghz!

I guess Crysis wasn't built with WARP10 in mind though. It would be interesting to see the results for a game that was.

That really depends on what you do with your data.

Some calculations ar much faster on a GPU...those are the ones we are getting to much PR about...some calculations are much slower on the GPU...those you don't hear about....because they show the reality:

It's only a small number of calculation that can be done on a GPU instead of a CPU...and make sense at the same time.
(power consumption, time ect.)

Don't think the GPU can replace your CPU just yet...

Posted by pjbliverpool on Tuesday, 25-Nov-08 15:12:12 UTC

Quoting Ateo
That really depends on what you do with your data. Some calculations ar much faster on a GPU...those are the ones we are getting to much PR about...some calculations are much slower on the GPU...those you don't hear about....because they show the reality: It's only a small number of calculation that can be done on a GPU instead of a CPU...and make sense at the same time.(power consumption, time ect.) Don't think the GPU can replace your CPU just yet...

I should have clarified my statement to specify "for rendering". I didn't mean to suggest that GPU's are faster across the board, just that we're no where near the point of being able to hang up our GPU's in favour of software based rendering yet. Larrabee may rock the boat in that regard though.

Posted by Davros on Tuesday, 25-Nov-08 18:44:31 UTC

Windows 7: Combined release with Direct X11 is unlikely - Microsoft answered some questions about Windows 7.
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,667657/News/Windows_7_Combined_release_with_Direct_X11_is_unlikely/

Quote
PCGH: Will Windows 7 be delivered with DirectX 11?

Ben Basaric: That is to be determined yet. I could speculate, but that wouldn't help you. But I can give a tendency: unlikely.

Edit : theres nothing like a bit of drama to liven up your day ;)

Quote
Microsoft's Ben Basaric just told us that Windows 7 will, contrary to the rather vague statement a few days ago, be delivered with DirectX 11. Furthermore DX11 will also come for Windows Vista although Microsoft wouldn't confirm, if this will coincide with the release of Service Pack 2 for Vista.

Add your comment in the forums

Related nvidia News

NVIDIA launch 9-series GeForce IGP and get Macbook deals
NVIDIA quietly release 9 cluster GTX 260
RWT on NVIDIA GT200
NVIDIA release CUDA 2.0
NVIDIA's Huang admits to underestimating ATI
NVIDIA release beta OpenGL 3.0 driver following SIGGRAPH session
NVIDIA denies exit from core logic market
NVIDIA releases beta Forceware update
NVIDIA PerfHUD 6.0 released
NVIDIA SLI to be available with upcoming Intel desktop computing platform