Epic Games Shows NVIDIA Kepler GPU Running Samaritan Demo at GDC
Last year at the Game Developers Conference, Epic Games unveiled the impressive looking Samaritan demo. The demo was so intense that it took three NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 video cards in SLI to run the demo in real-time. Today GDC 2012 Epic again showed the same Samaritan demo, but this time the demo was shown running on a single NVIDIA ‘Kepler’ graphics card. Epic said that the Kepler video card in the system used under 200 Watts of power, which is only a fraction of what three GeForce GTX 580 cards used in SLI. It wasn’t just the Kepler graphics card that made the demo possible. As important was the addition of Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA), an NVIDIA-developed anti-aliasing technique aiming to improve upon the established success of Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA), the form of anti-aliasing most commonly seen in todays games. It appears that NVIDIA is very close to launching the GeForce 600 series of graphics cards as game developers obviously have the cards in their possession and permission to show them off.
“Without anti-aliasing, Samaritans lighting pass uses about 120MB of GPU memory. Enabling 4x MSAA consumes close to 500MB, or a third of what’s available on the GTX 580. This increased memory pressure makes it more challenging to fit the demos highly detailed textures into the GPUs available VRAM, and led to increased paging and GPU memory thrashing, which can sometimes decrease framerates.
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