Developer Newsletter: Issue #28

Past newsletter issues are also available in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

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The latest release of nvDXT and related utilities now perform all internal calculations using floating point arithmetic, resulting in higher quality textures. They now support texture sizes up to 8k by 4K, and support for DXT5_NM (compressed normal maps) has been added. If you haven't updated your NVIDIA DDS Utilities for a while, now is the time!

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This release of FX Composer includes several minor bug fixes and installer updates. It has also been updated to support the Microsoft DirectX SDK April 2005 Update.

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Let's Get Small talks about mipmapping, explaining how the process works and how to make full use of it. It also includes discussions on how mipmapping affects different kinds of textures, such as bump maps, normal maps, and color maps, advice on how to use mipmapping effectively in your authoring pipeline, and much more.

Image Processing on the GPU whitepaper describes the basic methods of GPU usage for image processing and provides useful pointers to documentation, demo programs, and other developer tools.

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An independent review of our latest book, GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation, is now available on Slashdot.

You can also find Slashdot reviews of our previous books, GPU Gems: Programming Techniques, Tips, and Tricks for Real-Time Graphics and The Cg Tutorial: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Programmable Graphics.

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In conjunction with the announcement of GeForce 7800 GTX, we have announced immediate availability of our new Windows Hardware Qualification Labs (WHQL)-certified NVIDIA ForceWare Release 75 graphics driver. The new driver supports more than seven different operating systems and more than 250 NVIDIA products. This new driver features:

• Support for OpenGL 2.0. The latest API and new extensions enable rich shader effects on NVIDIA GPUs.
• Improved SLI Performance and Features. Allows end users to achieve incredible performance for games and applications and enable SLI in any game for maximum flexibility; includes broader SLI validation and optimizations for the latest games.
• Improved Video Functionality. Includes support for inverse 2:2 pull-down detection and correction, high definition 1080i deinterlacing, HDCP support, and more.
• Support for Windows XP, Windows XP Profession x64, Windows NT4, Windows 9x/ME, Linux 32-bit, Linux 64-bit, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

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Now more than ever, being an NVIDIA developer has its privileges. The Developer Relations team recently worked with Dell to get an amazing deal on a number of Dell Dimension XPS Gen4 Gaming PCs for use at E3 2005. Now that the show is over we're offering up this E3 System Special to our entire developer community for an amazing price. Interested? Click here for full details.

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Joining our Registered Developer program is free and gives you access to a number of benefits:

• Developer Forums
• Prerelease Tools
• Prerelease Drivers
• Bug Reporting

Joining is easy!  Simply fill out one of applications below:

• Game Developer Application
• Workstation Developer Application
• Handheld Developer Application

Please note that it may take a few weeks to receive a decision on your application, due to the large number of applicants.

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Join NVIDIA and the Microsoft Windows Gaming & Graphics team at Meltdown 2005 (July 26-27) which will feature tracks covering: Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005, Windows codename: "Longhorn", Graphics, General Windows platform best practices, and Publishing and Business Development. NVIDIA will be hosting a suite at the event so please plan on stopping by. You can learn more about Meltdown and register by visiting http://www.microsoftmeltdown.com.

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NVIDIA will be participating in and sponsoring a number of different sessions and other events at SIGGRAPH 2005. These sessions and events include two sponsored talks, three sketches, and several courses. A complete list is available on our "NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH 2005" page.

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If you're a Japanese developer, don't miss our Iron Developer event at CEDEC 2005. We'll be giving four talks there, covering a range of topics:

• Mike & Luna: Even More Secrets from the NVIDIA Demo Team & Next-Generation Special Effects
• Shader Integration
• Shaders in Your Toolchain: COLLADA & FX Composer 2.0
• Performance Tools and SLI Programming

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To enable Transparency Multisampling in D3D first check if it is supported:

(pd3d->
CheckDeviceFormat(D3DADAPTER_DEFAULT, D3DDEVTYPE_HAL, 
                  D3DFMT_X8R8G8B8, 0,D3DRTYPE_SURFACE,
       (D3DFORMAT)MAKEFOURCC('A', 'T', 'O', 'C'))) == S_OK);

When rendering alpha tested fragments Multisampling can be turned on by setting:

pd3dDevice->
SetRenderState(D3DRS_ADAPTIVETESS_Y,
               (D3DFORMAT)MAKEFOURCC('A', 'T', 'O', 'C'));

To enable Transparency supersampling first check if it is supported:

(pd3d->
CheckDeviceFormat(D3DADAPTER_DEFAULT, D3DDEVTYPE_HAL,
                  D3DFMT_X8R8G8B8, 0, D3DRTYPE_SURFACE, 
       (D3DFORMAT)MAKEFOURCC('S', 'S', 'A', 'A'))) == S_OK);

When rendering alpha tested fragments supersampling can be turned on by setting:

pd3dDevice->
SetRenderState(D3DRS_ADAPTIVETESS_Y,
               (D3DFORMAT)MAKEFOURCC('S', 'S', 'A', 'A'));

Both modes can be turned off by setting:

pd3dDevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_ADAPTIVETESS_Y,
                           D3DFMT_UNKNOWN);

Some of the most popular pages and downloads over the past few weeks have been:

• NVIDIA GPU Programming Guide. Useful advice on how to identify bottlenecks and eliminate them by taking advantage of the latest GPU features.
  
  
• NVPerfHUD 3. NVPerfHUD is a performance analysis tool that overlays a graph of useful information on top of DirectX 9.0 applications.

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