14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia, a world leader of graphics cards manufacturer, steps up once again with tools that will help game developers on their future creations. The three products delivered by the company are PerfHUD 6.0, FX Composer 2.5 and Shader Debugger (this one requires payment for commercial use).
"These new tools reinforce our deep and longstanding commitment to help game developers fulfill their vision," said Tony Tamasi, vice president of technical marketing for Nvidia. "Creating a state-of-the-art video game is an incredibly challenging task technologically, which is why we invest heavily in creating powerful, easy-to-use video game optimization and debugging tools for creating console and PC games."
PerfHUD 6.0 is a powerful graphics debugging and performance analysis tool for DirectX 9 and 10 applications. The SLI support will be regarded as a great feature for most developers. The second tool released, FX Composer 2.5, helps game designers by fast creating real-time visual effects, working as an integrated development environment. Shader Debugger, the latest application, helps the debugging and optimization of shaders written with HLSL, CgFX, and COLLADA FX Cg in DirectX and OpenGL.
PerfHUD and PerfKit have been the peak of real-time 3D graphics performance tuning for quite a long time now. September 2007 brought PerfHUD 5.0, with support for Direct3D 10, x64 and Windows Vista. The new release, PerfHUD 6.0, starts from there and adds powerful new features.
Highlights of the new release include profiling 32-bit applications on 64-bit Vista and XP, SLI support, as well as no instrumented driver needed for Vista. Texture modification and visualization, mid-frame, access to the D3D call stack, keyboard accelerators and better hotkey configuration, custom layout load/store, and support for GeForce 8 and 9 have also been added to the PerfHUD 6.0 tool.
PerfHUD proved to be a pinnacle 3D graphics tool from the release of the 5.0 version, the core facets of the application being the most important, especially the Frame Debugger. And, while other versions of the product have also been released, ATI's similar tools have been static during this time. The 6.0 version can only make things better for PerfHUD.
FX Composer 2.5 bundles mental mill Artist Edition, allowing for shaders to be visually authored through connecting nodes. Shaders can be exported from mental mill Artist Edition to FX Composer, where they can be applied to real-world geometry and complex operations can also be performed. The new release brings important features like DirectX 10 support, including geometry shaders and stream out, visual Styles, allowing the creation, defining, and exportation of multiple looks for a model, support for the NVIDIA Shader Debugger, or remote control over TCP/IP.
NVIDIA Professional Developer Tools lineup came to life with the release of the NVIDIA Shader Debugger. The tool is intended to help professional developers that require more industrial-strength capabilities and support. An important feature of the NVIDIA Shader Debugger is that it can run on leading GPUs from all vendors. Features of the Debugger include cross-language and cross-API support, debugger run control (single step, run to cursor, run to bookmark), or visual debugging, including value visualization (map variables to colors) or conditional pixel kill.
