NVIDIA GeForceTM FX Key Features The Dawn of Cinematic Computing
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CineFX Engine

As special effects in the latest Hollywood blockbuster films continue to advance at an incredible rate, you’ve come to expect amazingly realistic explosions, true-to-life ocean waves in a sea storm, and incredibly vivid colors in animated features. So there's no reason you should settle for anything less than the best when it comes to your games. Architected for high-level programming languages like Cg, the NVIDIA® GeForce FX GPU’s new CineFX engine produces gaming effects on par with the hottest motion pictures. Combined with 128-bit studio-quality color processing technology, 3D worlds and characters are more real than anything that's come before. Hollywood dreams are now a desktop reality.

The NVIDIA CineFX engine allows developers to easily apply their distinctive style to digital content, achieving cinematic visual effects in real time with specialized graphics programs called shaders. Powered by the CineFX engine, the GeForce FX shifts the focus from simple pixel fill rate to sophisticated pixel shading. The GeForce FX eliminates many programming barriers previously associated with pixel shaders by supporting long programs for even the most elaborate effects, and conditional branching capabilities for greater efficiency. To maximize programming choice, the NVIDIA CineFX engine includes the most complete hardware feature implementation for both OpenGL® and Microsoft® DirectX® environments, including total support for the latest DirectX 9.0 vertex and pixel shader specifications.

The pixie from the NVIDIA Dawn tech demo employs a number of advanced vertex and pixel shading effects. A complex combination of color maps, specular maps, and blood characteristic maps product very realistic skin. Can you tell the difference between real skin and the pixie's? Check out screenshots from the NVIDIA Dawn demo here.

VERTEX SHADERS 2.0+
With the CineFX engine, vertex-processing capabilities are greatly expanded while programming complexity is greatly reduced, giving game developers the power to achieve any effect imaginable. Fully generalized loops and branches can be data-dependent, giving the CineFX engine a much more straightforward programming methodology than previous architectures. One shader can be written to encompass all the skinning methods and operations, and since the shader can branch on a per-vertex basis, it is not required to break up the model. With these advances, the CineFX engine shatters previous vertex shading limitations.

PIXEL SHADERS 2.0+
The NVIDIA CineFX engine raises pixel shading to a first-class programmable citizen of the graphics pipeline, and gives developers a host of new capabilities for controlling pixels and producing effects that are only limited by the imagination.

Advanced CineFX engine features include the support of 1024 instructions in a single rendering pass, allowing for complex effects that aren’t practical in any other architectures. For example, volumetric effects such as smoke, fur, fire and grass add significant depth and realism to a scene, but require multiple instructions to achieve. What CineFX achieves in one rendering pass takes competing products many more. Procedural texture support obviates the need for spending video memory on large texture maps, and allows for subtle, realistic differences across surfaces. Complex lighting can dramatically improve the realism of images, but traditionally adds to rendering time. With the GeForce FX all of these gorgeous enhancements are possible without sacrificing performance.

In addition, shaders can now handle multiple textures in one pass for optimized execution, making layered or mixed effects such as paint peeling off a metallic surface possible. The CineFX engine allows fetching from up to 16 unique texture maps in a single pixel shader program. These textures can be anything that defines surface or subsurface properties such as bump maps, displacement maps, gloss/specular maps, environment maps, shadow maps and albedo maps.

By taking advantage of the CineFX engine, programmers gain increased levels of precision with true 128-bit color, the ability to write longer shader programs incorporating more effects, dynamic branching and looping for greatly enhanced control flow, and a shorter shader development cycle using the Cg graphics language. All of this translates into game environments and characters that teeter on the very brink of realism—delivering more powerfully immersive real-time experiences for you, the enthusiast.