Software for "Multicore and GPU Programming for Video Games"

If you want to set up your machine with the various programs we will use in this class, so you can work on your own machine instead of the ones in the lab (which is encouraged), this page of links is for you. (We may not use everything listed here in this particular offering, but this is all good stuff to have on your hard drive if you are interested in the course topics.) Even if your machine does not have a sufficiently powerful graphics card, you may still be able to download some of the SDKs and write and compile code on your machine, and then later try running the code on one of the lab computers (or a friend's computer with a better graphics card.) We will be using Microsoft Windows for much of the course - either XP or Vista should suffice. The Cell portion of the course will use a Fedora Core virtual image.

GPU-related programs

DirectX 9 SDK
NVIDIA SDK 9
Cg Toolkit 2.0 (look under "Install Packages")
Cg Tutorial Examples Installer
FX Composer 2.5
CUDA driver, CUDA toolkit, and CUDA SDK code samples - you want CUDA 2.0

XNA Game Studio

Make sure you have Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (in theory you should be able to get this from DreamSpark)
If you are using Visual Studio 2005, you must make sure you have Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 (available here).
Unfortunately, XNA GS 2.0 does not officially support Visual Studio 2008. However, note that Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 can happily coexist.
We have seen some workarounds posted on the web for getting XNA GSE 2.0 to work in Visual Studio 2008; you are welcome to try those if you can find them, but we do not know how well they work.
XNA Game Studio 2.0 - be sure to download XNA after you have Visual Studio 2005 and its Service Pack 1 installed)

Cell

You will need either VMWare or VMWare Player. The VMWare Player is free for everyone, and available for Windows and Linux. The full VMWare is available from the Software Distribution section of the OIT website, and is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
Get the Cell SDK3.0 VMWare image from here; see the "Downloading the System" section. Also be sure to note the instructions under "Running the System," particularly the login and password for the Fedora image.