Nvidia Releases SIGGRAPH Presentations, Updates FX Composer

Nvidia has released materials from its 2005 SIGGRAPH presentations, and announced that an upgrade to its FX Composer to version 1.8 has been released. FX Composer allows developers to create shaders in an integrated development environment with real-time preview & optimization features. FX Composer was designed with the goal of making shader development and optimization easier for programmers while providing an intuitive GUI for artists customizing shaders for a particular scene. The latest version of FX Composer supports the following new features: Shader Model 3.0 support, Microsoft DirectX preview pipeline compatibility, Microsoft DirectX Standard Semantics & Annotations Specification compliance, FX Composer SDK examples showing how to import custom file formats and create automation scripts, and ShaderPerf updates supporting vertex shader analysis and GeForce 6 Series GPUs. The update can be downloaded from Nvidia's site. Also available at the site are the SIGGRAPH presentation slides for all Nvidia-related seminars, along with presentation notes where necessary. The slides can be downloaded on an individual presentation basis, or as a single zip file containing all the slides.