NVIDIA Unveils the World's Most Advanced Game Development Platform

SANTA CLARA, CA—MARCH 7, 2007—The game development industry is currently in the middle of one of the biggest transitions in its history with the introduction of Microsoft DirectX 10. To help the development community transition quickly to DirectX 10, NVIDIA® (Nasdaq: NVDA) today introduced a definitive new platform for advanced game development.

The core of this platform is a new development suite to help developers create and optimise state-of-the-art PC games for DirectX 10. The new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit will save developers time and money in creating games that deliver almost lifelike graphics and physics realism. The platform also consists of: NVIDIA GeForce® 8 Series graphics cards, NVIDIA nForce® 680 motherboards, and DirectX 10. This is the world’s most advanced game development platform; it enables the creation of ground-breaking next-generation content that will reset consumer expectations for realism in PC games.

The new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit makes it easier for developers to create Microsoft DirectX 10-compatible games by offering instructive code samples, advanced shaders, performance tuning, and more. The Toolkit delivers significant performance gains and saves developers time in developing and optimising games.

The NVIDIA Developer Toolkit includes:

* SDK 10: all-new DirectX 10, OpenGL, and CUDA code samples for the latest GPUs
* Texture Tools: Powerful libraries and plug-ins for working with textures – now with DirectX 10 support and approximately 10x faster due to GPU acceleration via CUDA
* PerfKit 5: powerful tools for debugging and profiling GPU applications for Windows Vista and DirectX 10 – now with shader edit-and-continue, render state modification, customisable graphs and counters, and more
* ShaderPerf 2: detailed shader performance information with support for new drivers
* FX Composer 2: a world-class development environment for cross-platform shader authoring; DirectX and OpenGL support with HLSL, Cg, and COLLADA FX
* Shader Library: the world’s largest collection of GPU shaders featuring more than 100 different shader effects and support for external submissions

Cevat Yerli, president of Crytek, said, “We use the NVIDIA developer tools frequently for performance analysis, optimisation, shaders, and testing. The NVIDIA developer tools have saved us a significant amount of time and money in the course of our work on Crysis. The exceptional debugging, visualisation and profiling capabilities in these tools make them a 'must' for any development group. It actually amazes me that NVIDIA provides them for free.”

“NVIDIA’s developer tools are some of the best in the industry,” said Mark Robinson, technical director at Rockstar San Diego. “I use FX Composer regularly to quickly prototype shaders, the SDK for inspiring new techniques, and PerfKit for detailed performance analysis and debugging.”

Some of the new tools are available online at developer.nvidia.com. NVIDIA will also be distributing selected tools at the Game Developers Conference (Booth #5134, North Hall) in San Francisco, including SDK 10, Texture Tools, Shader Library, and ShaderPerf. The other tools will be released after GDC. In addition, developers can attend detailed sessions on NVIDIA development technology on Thursday, March 8th, beginning at 9 am in Room 3018 (West Hall). For more information on the NVIDIA sessions, please go to: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gdc-2007.html

For more details on the ultimate development platform, please visit: http://developer.nvidia.com/page/home.html

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation is the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies. The Company creates innovative, industry-changing products for computing, consumer electronics, and mobile devices. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit www.nvidia.co.uk.