Purple Fairy Heralds NVIDIA's New Dawn

[Karloff]

Purple Fairy Heralds NVIDIA's New Dawn


The graphics card maker NVIDIA is showing off its new technology with a downloadable demo.

Ten years ago California-based GPU manufacturer NVIDIA came out with a tech demo [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D2meIv08rQ], which it called Dawn, to showcase the capabilities of its technology. In honor of the occasion, and its latest upgrades, it has released a new video featuring the same cheerful winged mascot. It's a new Dawn for NVIDIA - puntastic, I know - and for those who have access to the right hardware there's also a demo for you to poke around on.

The tech uses tessellation and displacement mapping to get those shimmering effects. So far that's been tricky to pull off, because of the amount of data that needed to be manipulated and the difficulty involved in doing so. NVIDIA believes it has cracked it. "With DirectX 11," according to its website [http://www.nvidia.com/object/tessellation.html], "tessellation and displacement mapping finally come together in a happy union, and already, developers [are] jumping on board." The new processes could result in more organic-seeming character models and detailed environments; exactly the sort of assets that the new Dawn shows off.

The video has been out for a short while, but this is the first time the demo has been available for download. The demo version will require the following tech specs:

GPU: GTX 670 or 680 (GTX 670 SLI, GTX 680 SLI, or GTX 690 recommended for Ultra mode)
CPU: 2.5GHz Dual-Core or higher
System Memory: 4GB
Disk Space: 2GB
Operating System: Windows 7 or Windows Vista

For more information, best have a look at the GeoForce website. [http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/a-new-dawn-directx-11-demo-available-for-download/]

Source: Joystiq [http://www.joystiq.com/2012/07/24/nvidia-releases-a-new-dawn-graphical-tech-demo/]


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[odBilal]

The system reqs scare me a little bit but maybe I'll throw the demo at my good ol' GTX 580 anyway to see what happens

 

[RA92]

... exactly the sort of assets that the new Dawn shows off.

Yeah, they're showing off some assets alright.

 

[WanderingFool]

Is it just me, or is her movement animations for her limbs kinda stiff...

and that was actually a unfortunate choice of words.

 

[Megacherv]

Oh, it's this sort of demo again. Their faces are creepy, and I have to study this next year as well...

...feckin' shaders...

 

[zerragonoss]

I am impressed she manged to stay out of the uncanny valley for me for a full 20 seconds till the way she moved just started to fell really creepy.

 

[jFr[e]ak93]

It was good til the fairy showed up. Really stiff looking/ non life like.

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

I wasn't really all that wowed until they zoomed in on her face and you could see her hair. Each strand being rendered independently, the way the wind moved it...gaming immersion in my future and bloodshot-eyed descent into depression for the "hair modeling teams" of true DX11 software

 

[Dastardly]

Purple Fairy Heralds NVIDIA's New Dawn

Further proof, to me, that textures/shaders/particles/etc. have firmly plateaued. Because I watch that video, and all I notice is very unnatural movement in the animation.

Even that little bit showing off the indivudal hairs fluttering with the motion of her head -- is each strand weighted or something? That's not how hair moves. That's how kelp/i] moves.

Don't get me wrong, though. I see this as a good thing. It means that good animation needs to go back into the hands of animators. The most beautiful models and complex physics in the world mean nothing without animators that understand movement through space. Technology is still unable to surpass the human contribution.

 

[Shinsei-J]

I'll have to download this, I like fairys you see.
Also tech demos.

 

[vxicepickxv]

I guess this all but makes the 64 bit OS official.

 

[grigjd3]

So you all should be paying attention to the hair and the leaves before you comment about how terrible it is. These are things that are extraordinarily hard to render with any sense of realism and they did an excellent job with it.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

So you all should be paying attention to the hair and the leaves before you comment about how terrible it is. These are things that are extraordinarily hard to render with any sense of realism and they did an excellent job with it.

I saw the leaves and thought that they sure looked pretty, but I expected nothing less. Then the fairy showed up, and the animations were so awkward that it made her look weirder than in the original from ten years ago. Sure, the technology behind it is impressive, but they seriously need to get some better animators working on these things if they want to use them to show things off without people complaining, because that's clearly the weakest part of the presentation. Some of the lighting and shader work is pretty neat, but no one's going to notice that when they're distracted by the character the camera's focusing on moves like something from five years ago.

 

[antipunt]

... exactly the sort of assets that the new Dawn shows off.

Yeah, they're showing off some assets alright.

...

*shakes head*

Oh yes. yes yes, *cough. Wai, huh? Sorry what were you saying?

 

[ScruffyMcBalls]

Personally I thought it looked fantastic, clearly their Animation team isn't up to scratch or the person directing the scene didn't have a lot of ambition, but regardless it looked great. What I now have to wonder is if this was pitched at the wrong audience. Could anyone here honestly see this being used for video games? The budget required to create a feature-length title using this technology would be so vast it I can barely comprehend it, and would the studio making the game ever see a return? Possibly, if it were a Square Enix title release when the company was in "very" good standing with their fanbase. And how long would it take to create something like this compared to what we see today? I'd bet twice as long, at least. And lastly, will we ever actually see a widely-enough distributed system that could run such a game and have an audience large enough to buy enough units to keep the project viable?
Ultimately I doubt it, which is why I think this would be better off being pitched for movies and animated series. I don't think we'll see this in video games. A shame, really, it is. But I'd rather see man hours and budget devoted to writing and programming rather than getting visuals from our current level up to "new Dawn".
But damn was that hair rendering pretty...