NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, today released the latest version of its NVIDIA Scene Graph Software Development Kit (NVSG SDK), allowing developers to optimize applications and exploit the latest professional graphics processing hardware. The NVIDIA NVSG 3.2 is widely used in a range of markets-from automotive styling and design to broadcast graphics and game development.
NVIDIA NVSG Version 3.2 offers several new features and performance improvements, including:
- Volume rendering for the display of 3D volume data such as MRI scans
- Microsoft Vista support
- NVIDIA SLI Multi-GPU support to take advantage of multiple graphics processing units in a single system
- Cg 1.5 support for shaders written with the latest version of the Cg programming language
- Improved performance with a reduced memory footprint and improved texture handling and caching
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 can combine and extend to create fast, reliable graphics applications.
Jeff Brown, general manager, NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group, said, “The NVIDIA scene graph provides application developers with a software infrastructure to quickly create sophisticated and high-performance 3D graphics applications. This new version of NVSG is highly extensible, GPU-centric and shader aware, it is also operating system and graphics API independent and offers cluster and multiprocessing multi-threading support. The enhanced list of features in NVSG makes it an extremely robust, future-proof scene graph.”
NVSG can be used to develop high-performance 3D applications for visual simulation, manufacturing, simulation-based design, scientific and medical visualization, broadcast video, architectural walkthroughs and computer-aided design. It enables developers to make optimal use of the hardware performance and sophisticated feature set of NVIDIA Quadro graphics. NVSG 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 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 solution, 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.