Nvidia Unveils DirectX SDK For PC Game Developers

Graphics card maker Nvidia on Wednesday introduced a toolkit for developers building PC games for DirectX 10, a Windows component used in rendering 3-D graphics.

The Nvidia Developer Toolkit was unveiled at the Gamer Developers Conference in San Francisco. The software development kit is part of Nvidia's platform for building PC games for Windows. Hardware components include the Nvidia GeForce 8 Series graphics cards, and the Nvidia nForce 680 motherboards.

To make game development easier, the SDK includes instructive code samples, advanced shaders, and tools for performance tuning. A shader in computer graphics is a set of software instructions used by a PC in rendering images.

Specifically, the toolkit includes DirectX 10, OpenGL, and Cuda code samples for Nvidia's latest GPUs, or graphic processing units. Cuda, or compute unified device architecture, is Nvidia's latest computing architecture that enables GPUs to solve complex computations faster. OpenGL is a 3-D graphics language.

Other SDK components include libraries and plug-ins for working with textures in graphics, tools for debugging and profiling GPU applications for Windows Vista and DirectX 10, and a development environment for cross-platform shader authoring, and a shader library that features more than 100 different effects.

More details on the development platform are available on Nvidia's Web site.