NVIDIA FX Composer

The NVIDIA FX Composer software package is an integrated development environment for modern shader development in both OpenGL and DirectX with support for multiple shading languages.
FX Composer empowers developers to create high-performance shaders with realtime preview and optimization features available only from NVIDIA.
Designed to make shader development and optimization easier for programmers, FX Composer offers an intuitive user interface for artists customizing shaders in a particular scene.
FX Composer also comes with mental mill Artist Edition to further help you in developing shaders visually.
FX Composer also supports the new NVIDIA Shader Debugger plug-in, which adds comprehensive pixel shader debugging functionality to FX Composer.
Here are some key features of "NVIDIA FX Composer":

Scene Manipulation

ï¿­ DirectX 10 support, including geometry shaders and stream out.
ï¿­ Visual Models & Styles allow you to easily define different "looks" for a model and to switch between them.
ï¿­ Quick particle system prototyping with several common templates: fire, smoke, fireworks, and fountains.
ï¿­ Support for industry standard 3d file formats: COLLADA, OBJ, X, 3DS and FBX.

Convenient Shader Authoring

ï¿­ Bundled with mental mill Artist Edition for visual shader authoring
ï¿­ Works directly with COLLADA FX, CgFX, and HLSL shaders to create multiple techniques and passes.
ï¿­ Support for Microsoft DirectX standard HLSL semantics and annotations.
ï¿­ Sophisticated text editing with syntax highlighting & bookmarks
ï¿­ Authoring of complex full-scene effects like shadow mapping and depth of field.
ï¿­ Convenient, artist-friendly graphical editing of shader and object properties.
ï¿­ Scene manipulation and object creation functionality.
ï¿­ Handles minimal recompilation of dependencies with shader include files, per effect compilation options and directives, and custom build configurations.

Production-Friendly Features

ï¿­ Allows the use of custom semantics and annotations and vertex stream packing to facilitate shader integration into real-world production pipelines.
ï¿­ Provides a complete plug-in architecture that allows arbitrary extensibility, including important custom scene data, support for additional shading languages, and user interfaces.
ï¿­ Python scripting to automate common production tasks like material parameter binding to scene objects.
ï¿­ Practical SDK that enables custom importers, exporters, and scene modifiers.

Debugging

ï¿­ NVIDIA Shader Debugger plug-in adds complete pixel shader debugging.
ï¿­ Visible preview of intermediate (generated) textures and render targets.
ï¿­ Capture of pre-calculated functions to texture lookup tables and save render ports to disk.
ï¿­ Interactive compiler that jumps directly to problems in your source code.

Performance Tuning

ï¿­ Simulated performance results for the entire family of NVIDIA GPUs through NVIDIA ShaderPerf 2 integration.
ï¿­ GeForce 8 Series support in ShaderPerf 2.
ï¿­ Empirical performance metrics such as GPU cycle count, temporary register usage, and vertex and pixel throughput.

User Interface & Convenience

ï¿­ Revamped Start Page facilitates common tasks such as project management, shader creation, and learning about FX Composer.
ï¿­ Streamlined user interface with improved icons.
ï¿­ Comprehensive Undo/Redo support
ï¿­ Predefined and Custom layouts to customize the application for specific tasks