Nvidia GameWorks is a

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software 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 c ...

software suite A software suite (also known as an application suite) is a collection of computer programs (application software, or programming software) of related functionality, sharing a similar user interface and the ability to easily exchange data with eac ...

developed by

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

. The Visual FX, PhysX and Optix SDKs provide a wide range of enhancements pre-optimized for Nvidia

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mob ...

s. GameWorks is partially

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

. The competing solution being in development by AMD is GPUOpen, which was announced to be

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything * Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism * Emancipate, to procur ...

and

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Ope ...

under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license co ...

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 PhysX is an open-source realtime physics engine middleware SDK developed by Nvidia as a part of Nvidia GameWorks software suite. Initially, video games supporting PhysX were meant to be accelerated by PhysX PPU ( expansion cards designed by ...

: For physics, destruction, particle and fluid simulations. *

OptiX Nvidia OptiX (OptiX Application Acceleration Engine) is a 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 av ...

: 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 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 "Direc ...

and

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve ha ...

developers, as well as tools for debugging, profiling, optimization and Android development.

References

External links

Nvidia GameWorks
{{Video game engines Middleware for video games Nvidia software Video game development software Free and open-source software

Components

See also

References

External links