Cg is to vertex shader assembly as C++ is to x86 assembly

Came across this page via Slashdot which has what appears to be the most detailed look at nVidia's Cg language and toolkit so far. Slashdot comments, so far, indicate that people don't seem to understand exactly what this technology is all about (as usual). Most of them are complaining that this is a proprietary technology that's going to go the way of 3dfx's GLIDE because other companies like ATI will never support it. Uhh... no, not quite the same. It's a high-level language that compiles down to vertex shader asssembly level instructions... that's all. Therefore the compiled shaders will run on any GPU that supports the standard.

There's an interview with Ivor St. John Clarke about Aquafying Office X over on the O'Reilly network. Here's some fun geek stats they list at the end of the interview:

The elements that required changes in the transition of Office to OS X included:

• 25 million lines of code
• 50 shared libraries
• 8,257 files
• 800 dialog boxes
• 500 icons

Nvidia gears up graphics tools for games. A new programming language called Cg, built with Microsoft's collaboration, may help developers of computer games render details such as fur and grass more realistically. [CNET News.com]

This looks promising. We've come so far in terms of graphics in the past 3-4 years, this might be the next big step towards nVidia's goal which is "real-time Toy Story quality graphics". It sounds like the graphics community is accepting it with open arms as well, which is definitely a good thing™.