Gaussian splatting is a novel approach to rendering complex 3D scenes by representing them as a collection of anisotropic Gaussians in 3D space. This technique enables real-time rendering of photorealistic scenes learned from small sets of images, making it ideal for applications in gaming, virtual reality, and real-time professional visualization. vk_gaussian_splatting is a new Vulkan-based��
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Geometric detail in computer graphics has increased exponentially in the past 30 years. To render high quality assets with higher instance counts and greater triangle density, NVIDIA introduced RTX Mega Geometry. RTX Mega Geometry is available today through NVIDIA RTX Kit, a suite of rendering technologies to ray trace games with AI, render scenes with immense geometry, and create game characters��
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By using descriptor types, you can bind resources to shaders and specify how those resources are accessed. This creates efficient communication between the CPU and GPU and enables shaders to access the necessary data during rendering.
]]>This post covers best practices when working with shaders on NVIDIA GPUs. To get a high and consistent frame rate in your applications, see all Advanced API Performance tips. Shaders play a critical role in graphics programming by enabling you to control various aspects of the rendering process. They run on the GPU and are responsible for manipulating vertices, pixels, and other data.
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The NVIDIA Optical Flow Accelerator (NVOFA) is a dedicated hardware unit on newer NVIDIA GPUs for computing optical flow between a pair of images at high performance. The NVIDIA Optical Flow SDK exposes developer APIs that enable you to leverage the power of NVOFA hardware in your applications. We are excited to announce the availability of Optical Flow SDK 5.0, which adds support for��
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Vulkan Video gives developers the choice of a powerful new API for accessing video processing acceleration. NVIDIA is expanding its commitment to Vulkan Video with tools and samples to help applications efficiently harness this significant new functionality. This post will help you discover whether Vulkan Video is right for your application��and if so, how to get started.
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Nsight Graphics 2022.3 and Nsight Aftermath 2022.2 have just been released and are now available to download. The Nsight Graphics 2022.3 release focuses on performance gains, bug fixes, and Vulkan improvements. Performance for the Ray Tracing Acceleration Structure Viewer has improved by up to 20x in some complex scenes, thanks to better occlusion culling. Additionally��
]]>This post covers best practices for Vulkan clearing and presenting on NVIDIA GPUs. To get a high and consistent frame rate in your applications, see all Advanced API Performance tips. With the recent Vulkan 1.3 release, it��s timely to add some Vulkan-specific tips that are not necessarily explicitly covered by the other Advanced API Performance posts. In addition to introducing new Vulkan 1.3��
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OpenCL is evolving the way it can interoperate with other APIs, such as Vulkan. This post gives you a tour of the new style of OpenCL interop, which is already supported in the latest NVIDIA drivers. We include downloadable sample code so you can try this new functionality today. Developers often use OpenCL for compute together with other APIs, such as OpenGL��
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Today, NVIDIA announced the latest Nsight Graphics 2022.1, which supports Direct3D (11, 12, DXR), Vulkan 1.3 ray tracing extension, OpenGL, OpenVR, and the Oculus SDK. NVIDIA Nsight Graphics is a standalone developer tool that enables you to debug, profile, and export frames built with high-fidelity, 3D-graphic applications. Download NVIDIA Nsight Graphics now.
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A total of 23 of the most often requested Vulkan extensions developed by NVIDIA and other Khronos members are now incorporated into the brand new Vulkan 1.3 core specification. NVIDIA is ready with day one drivers for developers to immediately try out this significant new version of the industry��s only modern, cross-platform GPU API on their own systems. Some of the most significant new core��
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Modern graphics APIs, such as Direct3D 12 and Vulkan, are designed to provide relatively low-level access to the GPU and eliminate the GPU driver overhead associated with API translation. This low-level interface allows applications to have more control over the system and provides the ability to manage pipelines, shader compilation, memory allocations, and resource descriptors in a way that is��
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Acceleration structures spatially organize geometry to accelerate ray tracing traversal performance. When you create an acceleration structure, a conservative memory size is allocated. This process is called compacting the acceleration structure and it is important for reducing the memory overhead of acceleration structures. Another key ingredient to reducing memory is suballocating��
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Mesh shaders were introduced with the Turing architecture and are shipping with Ampere as well. In this post, I offer a detailed look over mesh shader experiences for these hardware architectures so far. The context of these results was primarily CAD and DCC viewport or VR-centric. However, some of it may be applicable to games as well, which increase in geometric complexity.
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One of the most important aspects in professional software development is to detect errors as early as possible. Of course, the best case would be if we couldn��t even write erroneous code. The next best thing is errors that the compiler can detect. The worst cases are runtime errors. The hardest ones are hidden in code that only runs under certain circumstances. Murphy��s law says that��
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This post has been updated: Best Practices for Using NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing (Updated). This post gathers best practices based on our experiences so far on using NVIDIA RTX ray tracing in games. I��ve organized the tips into short, actionable items that give practical tips for developers working on ray tracing today. They aim to give a broad picture of what kind of solutions lead to good��
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This post was updated substantially in March 2020. The original post was about the experimental NVX extension, while the current post is about the production NV version. We are releasing the (DGC) Vulkan extension, which allows GPU generation of the most frequent rendering commands. This extension offers an improved design over the experimental NVX extension.
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GPU performance events can be used to instrument your game by labeling regions and marking important occurrences. A performance event represents a logical, hierarchical grouping of work, consisting of a begin/end marker pair. There are best practices for GPU performance events that are universally used by profiling tools such as NVIDIA Nsight Graphics and NVIDIA Nsight Systems��
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Note: This post was updated on 1/14/2025 to reflect updates. The increased performance potential of modern graphics APIs is coupled with a dramatically increased level of developer responsibility. Optimal use of Vulkan is not a trivial concept, especially in the context of a large engine, and information about how to maximize performance is still somewhat sparse.
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Sometimes the evolution of programming languages creates situations where ��simple�� tasks take a bit more complexity to express. Syntax annoyance slows down development or can negatively affect readability of code during maintenance. With this in mind, we recently released an open-source sample of a GLSL header generator for DescriptorSet-indexed types in Vulkan. For example, look at ray tracing��
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Machine learning harnesses computing power to solve a variety of ��hard�� problems that seemed impossible to program using traditional languages and techniques.?Machine learning?avoids?the need for a programmer to explicitly program the steps in solving a complex pattern-matching problem such as understanding speech or recognizing objects within an image. NVIDIA aims to bring machine learning to��
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RTX is NVIDIA��s new platform for hybrid rendering, allowing the combination of rasterization and compute-based techniques with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and deep learning. It has already been adopted in a number of games and engines. Based on those experiences, this blog aims to give the reader an insight into how RTX ray tracing is best integrated into real-time applications today.
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RTX introduces an exciting and fundamental shift in the way lighting systems work in games and applications. In this video series, NVIDIA Engineers Martin-Karl Lefrancois and Pascal Gautron help you get started with real-time ray tracing. You��ll learn how data and rendering is managed, how acceleration structures and shaders work, and what new components are needed for your pipeline.
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NVIDIA��s new Turing GPU unleashed real-time ray-tracing in a consumer GPU for the first time. Since then, much virtual ink has been spilled discussing ray tracing in DirectX 12. However, many developers want to embrace a more open approach using Vulkan, the low-level API supported by the Khronos Group. Vulkan enables developers to target many different platforms, including Windows and Linux��
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When writing compute shaders, it��s often necessary to communicate values between threads. This is typically done through shared memory. Kepler GPUs introduced shuffle intrinsics, which enable threads of a warp to directly read each other��s registers, avoiding memory access and synchronization. Shared memory is relatively fast but instructions that operate without using memory of any kind are��
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