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Nvidia GameWorks
Nvidia GameWorks is a middleware software suite developed by Nvidia. The Visual FX, PhysX, and Optix SDKs provide a wide range of enhancements pre-optimized for Nvidia GPUs. GameWorks is partially open-source. The competing solution being in development by AMD is GPUOpen, which was announced to be free and open-source software under the MIT License. Components Nvidia Gameworks consists of several main components: * VisualFX: For rendering effects such as smoke, fire, water, depth of field, soft shadows, HBAO+, TXAA, FaceWorks, and HairWorks. * PhysX: For physics, destruction, particle and fluid simulations. * OptiX: For baked lighting and general-purpose ray-tracing. * Core SDK: For facilitating development on Nvidia hardware. In addition, the suite contains sample code for DirectX and OpenGL developers, as well as tools for debugging, profiling, optimization, and Android development. See also * PhysX * GPUOpen * TressFX * Havok (software) Havok is a middleware software ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nvidia
Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, it designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing, and system on a chip units (SoCs) for mobile computing and the automotive market. Nvidia is also a leading supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software. Nvidia outsources the manufacturing of the hardware it designs. Nvidia's professional line of GPUs are used for edge-to-cloud computing and in supercomputers and workstations for applications in fields such as architecture, engineering and construction, media and entertainment, automotive, scientific research, and manufacturing design. Its GeForce line of GPUs are aimed at the consumer market and are used in ap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GPUOpen
GPUOpen is a middleware software suite originally developed by AMD's Radeon Technologies Group that offers advanced visual effects for computer games. It was released in 2016. GPUOpen serves as an alternative to, and a direct competitor of Nvidia GameWorks. GPUOpen is similar to GameWorks in that it encompasses several different graphics technologies as its main components that were previously independent and separate from one another. However, GPUOpen is partially open source software, unlike GameWorks which is proprietary and closed. History GPUOpen was announced on December 15, 2015, and released on January 26, 2016. Rationale Nicolas Thibieroz, AMD's Senior Manager of Worldwide Gaming Engineering, argues that "it can be difficult for developers to leverage their R&D investment on both consoles and PC because of the disparity between the two platforms" and that "proprietary libraries or tools chains with "black box" APIs prevent developers from accessing the code for main ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middleware For Video Games
Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement communication and input/output, so they can focus on the specific purpose of their application. It gained popularity in the 1980s as a solution to the problem of how to link newer applications to older legacy systems, although the term had been in use since 1968. In distributed applications The term is most commonly used for software that enables communication and management of data in distributed applications. An IETF workshop in 2000 defined middleware as "those services found above the transport (i.e. over TCP/IP) layer set of services but below the application environment" (i.e. below application-level APIs). In this more specific sense ''middleware'' can be described as the hyphen ("-") in '' client-server'', or the ''-to-'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free And Open-source Software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free software and open-source software. The rights guaranteed by FOSS originate from the "Four Essential Freedoms" of '' The Free Software Definition'' and the criteria of '' The Open Source Definition''. All FOSS can have publicly available source code, but not all source-available software is FOSS. FOSS is the opposite of proprietary software, which is licensed restrictively or has undisclosed source code. The historical precursor to FOSS was the hobbyist and academic public domain software ecosystem of the 1960s to 1980s. Free and open-source operating systems such as Linux distributions and descendants of BSD are widely used, powering millions of servers, desktops, smartphones, and other devices. Free-software licenses and open-so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Havok (software)
Havok is a middleware software suite developed by the Irish company Havok. Havok provides physics engine, navigation, and cloth simulation components that can be integrated into video game engines. In 2007, Intel acquired Havok Inc. In 2008, Havok was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for advancing the development of physics engines in electronic entertainment. In 2015, Microsoft acquired Havok. Products The Havok middleware suite consists of the following modules: * Havok Physics: Originally from Ipion Software (Ipion Virtual Physics), it is designed primarily for video games, and allows for real-time collision and dynamics of rigid bodies in three dimensions. It provides multiple types of dynamic constraints between rigid bodies (e.g. for ragdoll physics), and has a highly optimized collision detection library. By using dynamical simulation, Havok Physics allows for more realistic virtual worlds in games. The company was developing a specializ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TressFX
AMD TressFX is a software library which provides for advanced simulation and rendering of hair, fur, and grass to be processed by the GPU. The initial library was written to perform well on AMD's GCN-based products. Version 3 was released on January 26, 2016, and works solely with Direct3D 11 and utilizes DirectCompute. A competing solution offered by Nvidia is HairWorks which is part of their Nvidia GameWorks suite and is proprietary in nature. Released as part of GPUOpen AMD TressFX is free and open-source software subject to the MIT License. Motivations for development and origins Traditionally, hair representation in video games has been sub-par for several reasons. For short hair (especially on male characters), hair has often been represented by a detailed texture on a character's skeleton. This makes it difficult to represent hair styles that are not pressed flat against the skull. Longer hair is often represented as a texture on a moving part of a skeleton and thus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
OpenGL
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve Hardware acceleration, hardware-accelerated Rendering (computer graphics), rendering. Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) began developing OpenGL in 1991 and released it on June 30, 1992. It is used for a variety of applications, including computer-aided design (CAD), video games, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and Flight simulator, flight simulation. Since 2006, OpenGL has been managed by the Non-profit organization, non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group. Design The OpenGL specification describes an abstract application programming interface, application programming interface (API) for drawing 2D and 3D graphics. It is designed to be implemented mostly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. The name ''DirectX'' was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs (the ''X'' standing in for the particular API names) and soon became the name of the collection. When Microsoft later set out to develop a Video game console, gaming console, the ''X'' was used as the basis of the name Xbox (console), Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology. The ''X'' initial has been carried forward in the naming of APIs designed for the Xbox such as DirectInput, XInput and the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), while the DirectX pattern has been continued for Windows APIs such as Direct2D and DirectWrite. Direct3D (the 3D graphics A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
OptiX
Nvidia OptiX (OptiX Application Acceleration Engine) is a Ray tracing (graphics), ray tracing API that was first developed around 2009. The computations are offloaded to the GPUs through either the low-level or the high-level API introduced with CUDA. CUDA is only available for Nvidia's graphics products. Nvidia OptiX is part of Nvidia GameWorks. OptiX is a high-level, or "to-the-algorithm" API, meaning that it is designed to encapsulate the entire algorithm of which ray tracing is a part, not just the ray tracing itself. This is meant to allow the OptiX engine to execute the larger algorithm with great flexibility without application-side changes. Commonly, video games use Rendering (computer graphics)#rasterisation, rasterization rather than ray tracing for their rendering. According to Nvidia, OptiX is designed to be flexible enough for "procedural definitions and hybrid rendering approaches". Aside from computer graphics rendering, OptiX also helps in optical and acoustical d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PhysX
PhysX is an Open-source software, open-source Real-time computer graphics, realtime physics engine middleware Software development kit, SDK developed by Nvidia as part of the Nvidia GameWorks software suite. Initially, video games supporting PhysX were meant to be Hardware acceleration, accelerated by Physics processing unit#AGEIA PhysX, PhysX PPU (expansion cards designed by Ageia). However, after Ageia's acquisition by Nvidia, dedicated PhysX cards have been discontinued in favor of the API being run on CUDA-enabled GeForce Graphics processing unit, GPUs. In both cases, hardware acceleration allowed for the offloading of physics calculations from the Central processing unit, CPU, allowing it to perform other tasks instead. PhysX and other middleware physics engines are used in many video games today because they allow game development, game developers to save development time by not having to write their own code that implements classical mechanics (Newtonian physics). To do, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MIT License
The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unlike copyleft software licenses, the MIT License also permits reuse within proprietary software, provided that all copies of the software or its substantial portions include a copy of the terms of the MIT License and also a copyright notice. In 2015, the MIT License was the most popular software license on GitHub, and was still the most popular in 2025. Notable projects that use the MIT License include the X Window System, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Lua (programming language), Lua, jQuery, .NET, Angular (web framework), Angular, and React (JavaScript library), React. License terms The MIT License has the identifier MIT in the SPDX License List. It is also known as the "#Ambiguity and variants, Expat License". It has the following terms: Co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Software
Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software (including profiting from them) regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program.Selling Free Software (GNU) Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users (not just the developer) ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices. The right to study and modify a computer program entails that the source code—the preferred ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
