NVIDIA works on helping to develop advancements in industry-standard APIs and game engines to drive graphics in games, empowering game developers to add next-generation graphics features such as ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS, mesh shaders and variable rate shading into their projects as quickly as possible.

Press release: NVIDIA’s Latest Suite of Tools Empowers Game Developers

In a continuing effort to drive graphics innovation and to make it easier for game developers to add next-generation graphics features to their games, NVIDIA released a new suite of tools today, including: 

• NVIDIA RTXGI SDK –  The RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI) SDK provides developers with scalable solutions to compute multi-bounce indirect lighting without bake times, light leaks or expensive per-frame costs. RTXGI is supported on any DXR-enabled GPU, and is an ideal starting point to bring the benefits of ray tracing to their existing tools, knowledge and capabilities.

Why is this important? RTXGI enables high-quality ray traced lighting in games while maintaining great frame rates. 

• NVIDIA Texture Tools Exporter – The NVIDIA Texture Tools Exporter uses CUDA to optimize textures for game engines or other applications. It is available as a standalone tool or as an Adobe Photoshop plug-in for game developers and artists.

Why is this important? This allows game developers to use higher quality textures (for higher texture resolution) in their applications, and provide the application to consumers in a smaller (and faster) download size.

Related Links:

NVIDIA DevZone article on NVIDIA RTXGI SDK: https://news.developer.nvidia.com/announcing-nvidia-rtxgi-sdk/

NVIDIA DevZone article on NVIDIA Texture Tool

https://news.developer.nvidia.com/Texture-Tools-Exporter-2020-1/

Vulkan Game Developers Get New Tools

NVIDIA embraces industry-standard APIs, and Vulkan is no exception. Today, NVIDIA added Vulkan support to two of its most popular game development tools.

• Nsight Aftermath is now available for the first time for Vulkan. Nsight Aftermath for Vulkan will be available via an SDK update along with support in Nsight Graphics for viewing the new Vulkan GPU crash dumps.

Why is this important? GPU crashes have historically been incredibly difficult to fix. With Nsight Aftermath, NVIDIA changed the game by providing precise information on where the crash occurred and why. 

• Nsight Graphics: GPU Trace has proven to be an invaluable tool for game developers developing on DirectX, and today NVIDIA is providing Vulkan developers with GPU Trace, a low-level profiler that provides hardware unit metrics and precise timing information.

Why is this important? Gamers demand high-fidelity graphics without compromising framerates. To do this, developers have the difficult task of profiling their applications to identify performance limiters. Game developers can achieve peak performance with the metrics that GPU Trace provides.

Related Links:

NVIDIA DevZone article on Nsight Graphics 2020.2 and Nsight Aftermath 2020.1:

https://news.developer.nvidia.com/nsight-graphics-2020-2/

You can get Nsight Aftermath 2020.1 here: 

https://developer.nvidia.com/nsight-aftermath 

You can get Nsight Graphics 2020.2 here: 

https://developer.nvidia.com/nsight-graphics