NVidia Updates Game Development Tools

Graphics card manufacturer NVidia does more than simply power the displays of many laptops and PCs; the company also offers a number of professional software tools for animation and game development. On Tuesday, NVidia released updated versions of tools designed to lower the cost of creating games.

FX Composer 2, is an integrated development environment for shader authoring, enabling fast creation of real-time visual effects. It support Microsoft's XNA platform for the Xbox, as well as becoming the standard for shader authoring on Sony's PlayStation 3 and Windows. PerfKit 5, meanwhile, offers a heads-up display that overlays real time DirectX debugging information and frame analyzation. Both tools are available for download from NVidia's developer Web site.