Crossing the Chasm at GDC: Virtual Reality, Cloud gaming, Special Effects and More

The Game Developer Conference is here. It’s a time to catch up with friends, share our work and celebrate our passion for gaming at this week’s gathering in San Francisco.

GDC is especially interesting this year. Innovation, invention and transformation are everywhere. There’s so much potential. So much new opportunity.

In particular, virtual reality and the cloud represent fundamental change and opportunity on all levels of technology for business and customers.

And the PC platform, our home base, keeps getting better, delivering more choice, scalability and performance than before; and importantly, with ever increasing simplicity.

At GDC, NVIDIA we’ll focus on three things.

First, we’re launching our GameWorks 3.1 software development kit. One of our most important goals is to create new technologies that help game developers make great games, faster, more efficiently and with amazing visuals.

GameWorks 3.1 includes three groundbreaking graphics techniques for shadows and lighting: NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting as seen in Fallout 4, NVIDIA HFTS as seen in Tom Clancy’s The Division, and NVIDIA VXAO as seen in Rise of the Tomb Raider have been released to developers.  And we have also released beta versions of NVIDIA Flow and NVIDIA Rigid Body Physics.

Second, we’ll show the results of our work inVR throughout the week. It’s clear that VR is an incredible medium, capable of a level of immersion that we’ve all dreamed of. But at the same time, it’s new, complicated and demanding. We’ve been hard at work with key partners in the VR ecosystem to build the gold standard platform for VR development.

From game engines, to head-mounted displays and SDKs, our NVIDIA VRWorks SDK represents the most comprehensive and high performance platform for VR development.  With multi-res shading, VRWorks is capable of up to 50% gains in performance, which translates into higher quality, higher fidelity and ultimately, more believable and immersive experiences.

We’re excited to share some incredible experiences that our partners have created in our booth and discuss during the sessions.

Last, we’ll be making exciting announcements on NVIDIA SHIELD – our family of high performance devices that deliver both great entertainment and serious gaming. NVIDIA is pioneering streaming games from the cloud with our GeForce Now service and GDC will bring some great new titles. Over the last year, we’ve seen SHIELD go from ambitious vision to product reality, and now we’re poised for a great future.

See you at GDC.

 

The post Crossing the Chasm at GDC: Virtual Reality, Cloud gaming, Special Effects and More appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

by Peter Kingsley via The Official NVIDIA Blog