Slashdot Mirror

Screw raster displays, I want a ray tracing display!

See this and this.

Pretty amazing considering current graphics cards are pretty much just optimized for rasterizing triangles really frigging fast. The new pixel/fragment shaders are really very cool.

Nvidia's Cg compilers have been open sourced. Download here.

CGShaders has a collection of shaders available for developers to use as a base (or as is) in their applications. It may not be a 'standard library', but at least it's a good starting point for some people, and should grow with time.

NVidia has released a compiler for their GPU's, Cg (C for graphics). I had great fun playing with it and see different effects (charcoal, dynamic fur, ...) in real time (pixel & vertex shading). It's even open source :P

See http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=cg_main and www.cgshaders.org.

Sack the sigs.

Isn't ati more going with microsoft, when developing their hardware than nvidia is? And last I checked, NVidia actually had better linux support for their current line of products than all other companies, well, although ati users I guess, have used firegl drivers to get 3d for their newer radeons. Although I hope that the best technology wins the battle, wether it be rendermonkey(ati), 3dlabs implementation, or cg. Although there are two proposals for one such language to be included as a part of the opengl 2.0 standard I believe. Or at least according to the latest opengl.org poll. Also sometime next month, as it was posted earlier here, NVidia is actually open-sourcing their cg toolkit, so hopefully it will be enough for the linux community to port it. That and look at the responses to questions about cg here
it shows some interesting answers to questions that would come up about cg. It seems to also be available for linux. So hopefully, if NV can remain able to enhance both apis(being directx and opengl), everyone will benefit.

The official community site is at cgshaders.org. There's a Linux Toolkit out now. There's a interview with CEO David Kirk. Along with articles, a shader repository, and forums for help.

The official community site is at cgshaders.org. There's a Linux Toolkit out now. There's a interview with CEO David Kirk. Along with articles, a shader repository, and forums for help.

Read a Slashdot's description: ""Cg Compiler" compiles high level Pixel and Vertex Shader language into low-level DirectX and OpenGL code"

Cg doesn't need ANY support from the video card.

This is no different from other programming languages. If someone would create new programming language and x86-assemebler for it, then code written in this language would run on ANY x86 CPU. Similary, code written in Cg would run on ANY video card which has Pixel and Vertex Shaders.

There is a great interview with David Kirk (Chief Scientist at NVIDIA) which talks about other Cg's features like on-the-fly compilation of Cg programs.