NVIDIA released a suite today to help game developers save time and money optimizing their games. The applications are called NVIDIA FX Composer 2 and NVIDIA PerfKit 5.

These applications allow the developments of complex games in less time, and for less money. "Today's big-budget PC games are enormously complicated to create and tune for maximum performance," said Niklas Westberg, Technical Director at Massive Entertainment. "The NVIDIA Developer Toolkit is a lifesaver - there's a wide variety of tools that help us accomplish more with less effort. The NVIDIA tools help us spend more time focusing on gameplay in World in Conflict, so that we can deliver the best possible experience for gamers."

FX Composer 2 is an integrated development environment for shader authoring that enables fast creation of real-time visual effects. The application can be used to create shaders for HLSL COLLADA FX Cg, and CgFX in DirectX and OpenGL.

The other application is NVIDIA PerfKit 5, which is a toolkit for real-time games and applications that supports DirectX 10 and Vista. NVIDIA says the core of PerfKit is PerfHUD that offers real-time debugging and profiling capabilities via a heads-up display that allows the monitoring of GPU signals, debug frames and the analyzing of frames.

"We used PerfHUD 5 extensively for optimizing Unreal Tournament 3," said Daniel Wright, Engine Programmer at Epic Games. "The frame debugger quickly finds rendering issues and the frame profiler is an excellent tool for rapidly identifying performance problems. PerfHUD 5's ability to interact with our engine in real-time allows us to have short iteration times which are crucial." NVIDIA PerfKit 5 is available for download from NVIDIA’s developer site.