ACADEMIA

NVIDIA Corporation today unveiled its new Scene Graph Software Development Kit that allows developers to optimize their applications to exploit the latest professional graphics processing hardware. The NVSG SDK is an object-oriented programming library (C++) that simplifies and speeds the development of high-performance 3D applications. The library also provides a comprehensive set of classes developers may combine and extend to create fast and reliable graphics applications. "NVIDIA's scene graph is intended to empower developers to quickly create sophisticated and thoroughly modern high-performance 3D graphics applications," said Dan Vivoli, executive vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. "NVSG is highly extensible, GPU-centric, shader aware, operating system and graphics API independent, and cluster and multiprocessing/multi-threading aware. With all of these attributes, developers can expect NVSG to be a contemporary and future proof scene graph technology." NVSG may be used to develop high-performance 3D applications for visual simulation, manufacturing, simulation-based design, scientific visualization, broadcast video, architectural walk-throughs, and computer-aided design, among others. By offering the most advanced features and innovative techniques, NVSG is designed to enable developers to make optimal use of both NVIDIA Quadro® graphics hardware performance and sophisticated feature set. For added flexibility, usability, and operating system independency, NVSG currently operates on top of the OpenGL® application programming interfaces (API) in either 32-or 64-bit Microsoft® Windows® or Linux operating system environments. NVSG is architected to allow for the integration of other rendering platforms such as Microsoft® DirectX®. In addition to being API flexible and operating system independent, NVSG takes advantage of higher level shader interchange formats. It features optimized memory management for NVSG objects; can be applied to clusters when used in conjunction with a genlock-capable NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics board; and supports multithreading and multi-pass rendering. Open and easily extensible, NVSG allows developers to create their own interfaces to add a variety of import and export file formats. "OpenGL performance is highly sensitive to the way certain instructions are sent into the system," said Ludwig A. Fuchs, co-founder and CTO of Realtime Technology. "Often it requires the user to 'know' which instructions to send and in which order, forcing you to carefully 'cull' the data to avoid sending in objects that aren't even visible in the resulting image. For simple programs, a tremendous amount of programming has to be done just to get started. We welcome the opportunity to bypass this process of breaking down objects and sending them to the engine for rendering with NVSG." A beta version of the NVSG SDK viewer is expected to be available for download by September 1 to licensed software developers at www.developer.nvidia.com.