NVIDIA Corporation announced from SIGGRAPH 2002 that it is open sourcing the NVIDIA CgCompiler technology under a nonrestrictive, free license. Availablein August 2002 for download from the developer.nvidia.com andwww.cgshaders.org Websites, this code will contain the parser thatreads the language and creates intermediate code for compilation, aswell as a generic back-end. Together, these components provideeverything required to create optimized Cg compilers for otherplatforms and architectures. In addition to the NVIDIA Cg Compiler,NVIDIA has provided full source code for example shaders in theNVIDIA Cg Toolkit. "We've experienced enormous interest in Cg sinceits introduction," said Dan Vivoli, vice president of marketing atNVIDIA. "We're open sourcing this compiler code to further acceleratethe transition to an era of advanced real-time effects through Cg."While at SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA is conducting training for Cg anddemonstrating the first Cg implementations from software vendors suchas Alias|Wavefront, Discreet and Softimage. According to NVIDIA,these first Cg-based offerings will be available to customers inupcoming versions of Alias|Wavefront Maya, Discreet 3ds max, andSoftimage SOFTIMAGE|XSI. NVIDIA's Cg -- the "C" for graphics languagespecification, was developed in close collaboration with MicrosoftCorporation and is compatible with Microsoft's recently announcedHigh Level Shading Language for DirectX 9.0. For more informationabout Cg, visit www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=cg.
