Industry giants form AOUSD to standardise 3D ecosystem

Industry leaders Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA – in partnership with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF) – have announced the formation of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD).

The main objective of AOUSD is to promote the standardisation, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) technology, thereby advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD).

OpenUSD, originally created by Pixar...

Omniverse Code helps developers to build 3D design and simulation tools

Nvidia has announced Omniverse Code, a new app to make it easier for developers to build advanced tools for 3D design and simulation.

The app includes the Omniverse Kit SDK runtime along with foundational tools, templates, and documentation. Developers won’t have to build from scratch with hundreds of Omniverse Extensions available to edit, modify, or integrate into their own extensions or applications.

Interactive documentation helps users to experience features like...

Cross-platform graphics API Vulkan is now ‘ray-tracing ready’

The Khronos Group has announced that Vulkan’s SDK, tools, and drivers are now “ray-tracing ready” for developers.

Vulkan is an open-source and interoperable alternative to graphics APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Metal. Ray-tracing, meanwhile, is touted as the next big advancement in the visual fidelity of graphics, especially for games.

“4A Games was one of the earliest adopters of hardware-level ray-tracing by developing the first real-time raytraced global...

Game developers will now have to opt-in to Nvidia’s GeForce Now

Game developers that want their titles on Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud streaming service will now have to opt-in.

GeForce Now has had a rough start. Almost every week there’s news of big titles leaving the service or studios abandoning the platform altogether. Of course, some new games are added – but the overall quality has noticeably dropped.

The service has, or will soon, lose games from: Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, Rockstar, Square Enix, Take-Two/2K Games,...