nVidia GF100 Architecture: Alea iacta est

NEXUS: Building an Ecosystem for Game Developers
Just like Star Wars, Terminator 2, Titanic or Avatar, the impact of the GF100 on content production will not be as valued in benchmarks compared to what it brings to users. Those movies may have not found their way into the hearts of moviegoers, but they changed the way movie production works for good.


Traditional Game Development according to nVidia

 While we do not know what kind of a market impact Fermi architecture will have as such, we know that gaming development will never be the same. We specifically asked is nVidia GF100 fully addressable as a C++ co-processor. In theory, it sounds nice but the reality is much better than that. We saw NEXUS for the first time at the nVidia GPU Technology Conference while it ran on Tesla and Quadro boards. With GF100 being ready to come out the door, the situation changed for the better. What I saw was on-the-fly debugging of game code running on a virtual machine. Sebastien Domine, Sr. Director of Developer Tools at nVidia demonstrated NEXUS on a system equipped with two graphics cards, running Windows 7 with Visual Studio 2008 and a virtual machine with again Windows 7 with the game code. 


NEXUS - a wholy integrated development system for developers

A bug was discovered on the virtual machine and NEXUS was able to completely freeze the rendered frame, followed with a step-by-step analysis until Sebastien found the rendering bug that appeared in the QA process. 
This is for the first time that we saw a GPU acting like a CPU, and this should make future debugging and bug tracing a breeze for the deadline-burdened developers. NEXUS works on older products as well but naturally, some features weren't supported in hardware until the DirectX 11/GF100-class hardware.

NEXUS will be available in two variants: a free version and a professional version for $349. Given the price of development tools, we don't view the professional version as necessary. The only major difference is tech support, since buying a license will grant you access to a 24-hour reply service.