As part of its on-going strategy to drive content creation to the next level, NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) introduced today its DirectX® 8 Development Kit for the content and game developer community. NVIDIA designed the DirectX 8 Development Kit to help developers capitalize on the breakthrough features enabled by Microsoft's® (Nasdaq: MSFT) DirectX 8.0 application program interface (API) and NVIDIA's highly programmable next generation graphics processing unit (GPU).

At the heart of the DirectX 8 Development Kit is NVIDIA's next generation GPU and the core graphics technology powering Microsoft's highly anticipated Xbox game console. Also included in the DirectX 8 Development Kit is NVIDIA's newly released DirectX 8 Software Developers Kit (SDK), NVIDIA's Unified Driver Architecture certified with industry-leading software programs, including 3ds max™ from Discreet, a division of Autodesk, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSK); Maya® from Alias|Wavefront™, an SGI (NYSE: SGI) company, and SoftIMAGE®|3D by Softimage Co., a subsidiary of Avid Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: AVID), and over 500MB of effects, source code, technical papers and development tools.