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[Enter the Dragon Punch]

http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/n...ation-with-launch-of-nvidia-gameworks-sdk-3-1
https://github.com/NVIDIA

This was announced 2 days ago and I still haven't seen anything about it?

NVIDIA today announced worldwide availability of the NVIDIA GameWorks™ software development kit (SDK) 3.1, which introduces three groundbreaking graphics techniques for shadows and lighting as well as two new physical simulation algorithms released as betas.

"It's our passion for gaming that drives us to tackle the technical problems presented by real-time rendering and simulation," said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA. "Our GameWorks technologies push the boundaries of what's possible in real time, enabling developers to ship their games with state of the art special effects and simulations."

The three new GameWorks rendering techniques for lighting and shadows include:

NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting - an advanced lighting technique that simulates how light behaves as it scatters through the air and atmosphere. NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting was first introduced in the hit video game Fallout 4.
NVIDIA Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows (HFTS) - an algorithm for drawing high-fidelity shadows that transition smoothly from hard shadows near the occluding object, to proper soft shadows in regions farther away. HFTS debuted in the hit video game Tom Clancy's The Division.
NVIDIA Voxel Accelerated Ambient Occlusion (VXAO) - NVIDIA's highest quality algorithm for real-time ambient occlusion, VXAO is a shading technique that adds depth and realism to any scene. It surpasses older techniques by calculating shadows in world-space using all scene geometry, as opposed to screen space techniques that can only shadow from geometry visible to the camera. VXAO debuted in the hit video game Rise of the Tomb Raider.

The pair of extensions to the NVIDIA® PhysX® library include:

NVIDIA PhysX-GRB - a new implementation of NVIDIA's popular PhysX rigid body dynamics SDK, which has been used in hundreds of games. This hybrid CPU/GPU physics pipeline improves performance by a factor of up to 6X for moderate to heavy simulation loads.
NVIDIA Flow - a computational fluid dynamics algorithm that simulates and renders combustible fluids such as fire and smoke. Unlike previous methods, Flow isn't limited to simulation of the fluids inside a bounding box.

NVIDIA makes source code for select GameWorks libraries available to developers via GitHub. Source code for NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting and NVIDIA's FaceWorks demo is available today. Source code for NVIDIA HairWorks, NVIDIA HBAO+ and NVIDIA WaveWorks will be available soon.

More information on NVIDIA GameWorks is available at https://developer.nvidia.com/.

Good move on Nvidia's part. Glad to see them bring this stuff out in the open. Hopefully this will lead to better compatibility with AMD products, and a better ability for modders to be able to fix shit if GameWorks goes fucky. [Disclaimer: I don't into code]

 

[Rebel Leader]

I never thought i would see these string of words

 

[Zepp Twofist]

This all seems like a good thing, but even as someone partial to Nvidia, I am wondering what their strategy with this is. They are usually very protective of their R&D.

 

[Enter the Dragon Punch]

This all seems like a good thing, but even as someone partial to Nvidia, I am wondering what their strategy with this is. They are usually very protective of their R&D.

I assume they're only making the bare inner workings of the features open source. Or something. I'm no technowizard.

 

[lucebuce12]

Open-Source? Seriously?

Of all the things I was expecting Nvidia to announce, this was not of them.

 

[dr_rus]

I never thought i would see these string of words

Why? PhysX source code has been available for a year now.

 

[elyetis]

This all seems like a good thing, but even as someone partial to Nvidia, I am wondering what their strategy with this is. They are usually very protective of their R&D.

It's probably their answer to AMD's GPUOpen.

 

[Mivey]

This all seems like a good thing, but even as someone partial to Nvidia, I am wondering what their strategy with this is. They are usually very protective of their R&D.

Maybe the part that destroys performance on AMD cards is so well hidden that even open sourcing them won't reveal them. We all know that the true bane of AMD is Gameworkds, after all.

 

[undu]

Why? PhysX source code has been available for a year now.

You have to create an account and accept an EULA with pretty restrictive clauses to be able to acces PhysX's code, it's not the same situation.

Example:

You shall not (nor allow, authorize or assist others to): decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, sublicense, network, rent, lease, loan, timeshare, sell, transmit, distribute, disclose, publicly display, publish, reproduce, create derivative works based on, assign or transfer the Materials to any other person or entity.

The Faceworks code's license seems to be quite close to a BSD license:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/FaceWorks/master/license.txt

 

[jmga]

Great, now open your Linux driver please.

 

[decoy11]

Found the FaceWorks stuff here https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/FaceWorks

Does anyone know where the NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting stuff is because I can't find it.

Anyways this doesn't look Open Source to me but a type of "Free Source" there is a license.txt file that looks a lot like the one you agree to on the Nvidia Developer website. This probably mean that AMD can't do much with it. This is like how CPU PhysX went "Free Source" last year nothing will change as we had games with PhysX and it still didn't run better on AMD.

 

[undu]

Found the FaceWorks stuff here https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/FaceWorks

Does anyone know where the NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting stuff is because I can't find it.

Not released yet: https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/FaceWorks/issues/1

 

[dr_rus]

You have to create an account and accept an EULA with pretty restrictive clauses to be able to acces PhysX's code, it's not the same situation.

Example:



The Faceworks code's license seems to be quite close to a BSD license:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/FaceWorks/master/license.txt

Depends on what you want from the source code. If it just to analyze it to make sure that there is nothing "wrong" then you could've done it with PhysX pretty easily. If you want to use the code to create a fork of your own then yeah, you can't do this with PhysX and I expect that other GW tech with the exception of the most basic one like HBAO will follow the same path.

 

[tuxfool]

I should point out that the source is available, but like UE this *isn't* Open Source all around. Though that Faceworks license very much seems to qualify.

One of the things that I think is provoking this is the fact that explicit APIs require a greater bulk of the work to be done by game developers. Nvidia can't just supply a blob and then expect people to integrate it with a high level API. Developers need to be able to see what is happening all the way up and down the software stack.

 

[Parsnip]

Wow.
Didn't see this one coming.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Oh damn, open source.

I can't wait to see how AMD reacts to this. Nvidia just completely invalidated the existence of GPUopen.

 

[Durante]

HBAO+ source code will be great to have. I played around with AMD's AO library, but I prefer the HBAO+ result.

 

[qa_engineer]

Very nice. Glad they followed AMD, should make game development and optimization that much easier.

Oh damn, open source.

I can't wait to see how AMD reacts to this. Nvidia just completely invalidated the existence of GPUopen.

React to what? How does this invalidate anything? They both have their code available to developers to tweak, add to etc. with which is a good thing for both companies and developers alike.

 

[Trace]

Wonder how many games we'll see VXAO in. Looks fantastic, heavy on the performance though.

 

[dr_rus]

Very nice. Glad they followed AMD, should make game development and optimization that much easier.

Gameworks developers had access to the sources in question since the beginning of the program and they were able to submit/request changes to NV to be implemented in the code.

The whole "making development and optimization easier" thing doesn't sound like something real to me because most of devs don't have enough time and/or incentive to perform these by themselves. There are reasons why GW exist after all and that reason is because it's being developed and optimized by NV and the integration doesn't require a big effort on part of a dev.

The pluses I see from this are a) the ability to perform a 3rd party code audit and b) use the code to build on it and develop something bigger and better without the need to reinvent the wheel.

 

[dr_rus]

NVIDIA Releases HairWorks, Volumetric Lightning and FaceWorks Source Code on GitHub – HBAO+ To Be Added Soon

 

[Kezen]

Wonder how many games we'll see VXAO in. Looks fantastic, heavy on the performance though.

It's the next gen of AO for sure. Looks supremely impressive even for a first shot.
Pascal GPUs will make it more affordable.

 

[Dictator93]

NVIDIA Releases HairWorks, Volumetric Lightning and FaceWorks Source Code on GitHub – HBAO+ To Be Added Soon

There it is. Now there can be no more complaints regarding the usage of these effects as black boxes... thankfully.

GPU-Open I guess had a pos effect on NV behvaiour?

It's the next gen of AO for sure. Looks supremely impressive even for a first shot.
Pascal GPUs will make it more affordable.

World space lighting :
"Da Future" /Ork voice

 

[Renekton]

Welp I am eating my words D:

 

[CHC]

NVIDIA Releases HairWorks, Volumetric Lightning and FaceWorks Source Code on GitHub – HBAO+ To Be Added Soon

That's awesome. I mainly prefer Nvidia's cards but (somewhat hypocritically I guess) I really don't like the idea of them dominating the world of cutting edge graphics tech via proprietary stuff like HBAO.

This was a good move they made.

 

[pottuvoi]

Really hope developers will have rights to change and build on top of these.

 

[wapplew]

This is same magnitude as MS open up cross platform multiplayer.