nVidia SDK - Curious choices

So I’ve just downloaded, installed and played with the new nVidia Handheld SDK, and I’m forced to ask… what’s the point?

The big feature seems to be an AppWizard for Visual Studio.NET 2003, that produces a sample VC++ app. The sample app runs in a GLUT-style window on the desktop machine.

That’s nice… but Visual Studio doesn’t produce executables that run on a handheld - at least not with VC++. You can do so with C# or VB.NET, but the wizard doesn’t produce apps of that flavor - just VC++.

There is no integration (that I’ve seen) w/ eVC3 or eVC4, so there’s no way to produce an actual .exe in C++.

In addition, the code produced by the wizard contains a number of nVidia-specific calls - egl functions w/ an ‘NV’ suffix. So code developed with this system will not be directly portable.

I’m probably missing something here, but if not, this seems to be a waste of time.

Hi,

It comes with a x86 and a xscale lib. I would think that it comes fine tuned for the Goforce chipset. It comes with a lot more than just an app wizard. It comes with a fixed point math library( which I would think is fine tuned for the NVidia chipset), DDS loading library and texture mapping library with source. Ofcourse all this can be written but having it already saves some time. And it also is supplemented with a few good samples.

Yes, it has an XScale lib, and a fixed point lib… but just how are you going to use these to build an exe that runs on an XScale uP? There is no emulator support - the only dev environment is the GLUT-style window that runs under VS.NET 2003. That’s hardly an adequate dev platform. And what do you do with the code you might create using this system? Cut and paste it into eVC so you can compile an XScale-compatible exe? From the perspective of a professional developer, this is of no value whatsoever.

[ November 10, 2004: Message edited by: DaveR ]

It might be like brew - which allows you to develop using vc++, but eventually you need to use the ARM compiler to build for the specific device. Although I cannot say this for sure.

Regarding emulator - definitely would be a good thing to have.

It’s too bad eVC++ can’t open the VC++ workspaces, even if you use VC++6
Otherwise, they seem quite similar.

You can send an email to devrel@nvidia.com

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