At SIGGRAPH in Boston, Derek Gerstmann of ATI presented a sketch titled, “A Performance-Oriented Data Parallel Virtual Machine for GPGPU Applications.” The system exposes GPU functionality at a low-level (including the fragment processors’ native instruction set), giving the programmer direct control over program compilation and loading, GPU memory management, and GPU/CPU synchronization. A write-up is available at www.ati.com/developer. If you are interested in obtaining the system for evaluation, please contact researcher@ati.com.

NVIDIA recently released an updated version of FX Composer with support for Shader Model 3.0 and tons of new sample shaders. The latest version also includes many developer-requested UI improvements, support for NV4x GPU performance analysis, and a beta SDK that allows developer to write their own automation scripts, importers/exporters, etc. The best way to view all the sample shaders is by downloading the latest NVIDIA SDK and looking at the “Effects” tab where you will find descriptions and screenshots of 250+ effects. (FX Composer Homepage)

Jahshaka is an open-source, real-time editing, effects and image processing application that works in 3D space. The 1.9a8 release of jahshaka, available today, is supports GPU-accelerated image processing. The Jahshaka developers’ research in real-time image processing using the GPU is described in a white paper.

ATI’s Ashli version 1.4.0 has been released and is available for download from: Ashli Home. Ashli is a toolkit intended to assist developers exploring programmable shading on GPUs. It supports a reasonable subset of OpenGL (GLSL), Microsoft’s DirectX (HLSL) and RenderMan shading languages. Ashli’s significant contribution is in hardware resource virtualization, segmenting a complex shader program into GPU realizable streams. The posted Ashli viewer application demonstrates the use of shader partitions in a multi-pass rendering context. Ashli outputs both metadata and code, orthogonal to any of the languages supported. Targets include OpenGL ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program, and DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader versions 2.0 and 2.X API’s. Optionally, Ashli emits a unified Microsoft FX file format, embedding progressive techniques of state and code sections. (Ashli 1.4.0)

TyphoonLabs has released version 1.3 of the OpenGL Shader Designer, an integrated development environment for GPU fragment and vertex shaders in GLSL (the OpenGL shading language). Key features include plugins for vertex attributes (tangents, binormals, etc.), textures (noise, volumes, etc.), real-time preview with multiple light sources, full syntax highlighting and “intellisense” for GLSL, and much more! (OpenGL Shader Designer 1.3)