Nvidia Gameworks boosts Linux, OSX, Android platforms

Nvidia at their developer and media event in Montreal, Canada on 17 October announced Gameworks, a collection of Nvidia technologies under a new brand for game developers to take advantage of.

During their product briefing Nvidia revealed that Gameworks now supports multiple platforms, covering Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Android platforms with the same developer tools and software kits to make good-looking games.

The company outlined their developer tools that they were including in the Gameworks SDK, which hinted at how Nvidia’s attention has shifted from the desktop PC market to Android and mobile markets. Gameworks supports on-the-fly debugging on Microsoft DirectX, OpenGL, CUDA, OpenGL/ES, and Android graphics APIs (application programming interface) in addition to being tightly integrated into Visual Studio.

Nvidia developer tools for Gameworks

Gameworks also includes standalone tools to help developers program for specific platforms in mind, which applies not only to Windows and Mac OS X, but the Linux environment as well. Nvidia said that specialised tools would be integrated into Gameworks to support Valve’s upcoming SteamOS, a modified Linux distribution built by the game developer and publishing giant.

As far as hardware support was concerned, Nvidia also noted that they support desktop and discrete Geforce graphics, Nvidia Shield and all other mobile platforms based on Tegra hardware. All of their technologies they showed at the event were also compatible with Tegra, as Nvidia built up their tools and technologies with scaling in mind.

Nvidia Gameworks Library

To hammer that point home, demos of Nvidia’s Digital Ira were shown running on prototype Tegra 5 hardware in full 1080p resolution. Tegra 5 is a first for Nvidia, including state-of-the-art ARM processors together with up to 128 Kepler-based CUDA cores.

For the first time, mobile devices such as phones and tablets based on Tegra 5 hardware will include the same graphics hardware found in desktops and laptops running Kepler-based discrete graphics cards. With the complete Gameworks library available on all major platforms, game developers can now port their titles without worrying about removing technologies that enhance the gaming experience, such as Physx.

Gameworks is now available to interested developers to implement in their games. Almost all technology available in Gameworks works on Geforce graphics cards only.