SIGGRAPH: Nvidia Announces Nvidia Scene Graph SDK 3.2

During SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston, graphics chip manufacturer Nvidia announced the release of the latest version of its Nvidia Scene Graph Software Development Kit (NVSG SDK). Version 3.2 of the software allows developers to optimize applications in order to take advantage of the latest graphics processing hardware. The software is available for download at no charge to Nvidia's developer partners, and offers a number of new features and enhancements over previous versions, including volume rendering for the display of 3D volume data such as MRI scans, Microsoft Vista support, Nvidia SLI Multi-GPU support, Cg 1.5 support for shaders written with the latest version of the Cg programming language, as well as 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. NVSG operates on top of the OpenGL application programming interfaces (API) in either 32-or 64-bit Microsoft Windows or Linux operating system environments. The software is also created to allow for the integration of other rendering platforms such as Microsoft DirectX. “The Nvidia scene graph provides application developers with a software infrastructure to quickly create sophisticated and high-performance 3D graphics applications,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Nvidia Professional Solutions Group. “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.”