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Some news coming from GDC

NVIDIA announces GameWorks SDK 3.1

http://videocardz.com/58535/nvidia-announces-gameworks-sdk-3-1

NVIDIA today announced worldwide availability of the NVIDIA GameWorks software development kit (SDK) 3.1, which introduces three groundbreaking graphics techniques for shadows and lighting as well as two new physical simulation algorithms released as betas.

The three new GameWorks rendering techniques for lighting and shadows include:

• NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting — an advanced lighting technique that simulates how light behaves as it scatters through the air and atmosphere. NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting was first introduced in the hit video game Fallout 4.
• NVIDIA Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows (HFTS) — an algorithm for drawing high-fidelity shadows that transition smoothly from hard shadows near the occluding object, to proper soft shadows in regions farther away. HFTS debuted in the hit video game Tom Clancy’s The Division.
• NVIDIA Voxel Accelerated Ambient Occlusion (VXAO) — NVIDIA’s highest quality algorithm for real-time ambient occlusion, VXAO is a shading technique that adds depth and realism to any scene. It surpasses older techniques by calculating shadows in world-space using all scene geometry, as opposed to screen space techniques that can only shadow from geometry visible to the camera. VXAO debuted in the hit video game Rise of the Tomb Raider.

The pair of extensions to the NVIDIA PhysX library include:

• NVIDIA PhysX-GRB — a new implementation of NVIDIA’s popular PhysX rigid body dynamics SDK, which has been used in hundreds of games. This hybrid CPU/GPU physics pipeline improves performance by a factor of up to 6X for moderate to heavy simulation loads.
• NVIDIA Flow — a computational fluid dynamics algorithm that simulates and renders combustible fluids such as fire and smoke. Unlike previous methods, Flow isn’t limited to simulation of the fluids inside a bounding box.

 

AMD-powered Sulon Q is like wearing a VR-capable Windows PC on your head

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/amd-powered-sulon-q-is-like-wearing-a-vr-capable-windows-pc-on-your-head/

The growing virtual reality platform wars got a little more complex this morning. That's because graphics chip maker AMD has thrown in with Toronto-based startup Sulon Technologies to unveil the Sulon Q headset, which aims to provide a PC-based, fully tracked virtual reality experience without the need to tether yourself to a computer tower.

According to the announcement, that "wear and play" untethered design makes the Sulon Q quite different from competition like the Oculus Rift or SteamVR-powered HTC Vive, which both need a relatively high-end PC to actually generate the images on the headset. With the Sulon Q, the Windows 10 PC hardware is built into the unit, including an expected four-core AMD FX-8800P processor with a Radeon R7 graphics card.

Add in a built-in 256GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, and a 2560×1440 OLED display with a 110° field of view, and it's a bit like wearing a lower-end (but still apparently VR-capable) PC on your head. AMD isn't specifically discussing the mass of the "lightweight" headset, but it seems likely to be much heavier than tethered headsets where the heavy processing is done externally (or even mobile headsets like the Samsung Gear VR, which are powered by much-more-compact smartphones).

Here's a video of the new headset

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPT4-nRP7Bk

 

And another one, that doesn't come frm GDC

Epic’s Tim Sweeney: Here’s how to keep Windows an open platform

http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/10/epics-tim-sweeney-heres-how-to-keep-windows-an-open-platform/

(...)

In this piece, I will describe the history of UWP and the state of the UWP implementation as it exists today, for the purpose of analyzing whether it does indeed comprise an open ecosystem.  And then I’ll propose concrete changes that would, in my opinion, make it so, and enable users, developers, and publishers to trust it as a future basis for PC applications.