NVIDIA Releases ‘A New Dawn’ Demo
NVIDIA has brought back Dawn once again, in a demo simply titled “A New Dawn.” A New Dawn is designed to showcase the graphical possibilities on the latest generation of Kepler based GPUs. The original Dawn demo had many merits, but due to the limitations of hardware at the time, it also took many short cuts. One of the most obvious was the fact that Dawn didn’t really have a home. Fairies, as we all know, live in the depth of mysterious forests, but for Dawn, her home was a giant glowing cube mapa six-sided texture that represented the environment around her. She had no trees to climb, no bees or butterflies to play with. She was a very lonely fairy.
Ten years later, at last Dawn has found a new home. In A New Dawn, the demo starts not with the main character, but with a sweeping overview of a lush rainforest. Ferns gently sway in the moonlight, vines sprawl across an ancient tree, and budding flowers cast a gentle glow on the surrounding bark. As our character comes into view, we find her swinging on a vine in her new tree home. The tree is rendered to the finest level of detail using DirectX 11 tessellation. At its peak, over four million triangles are used to showcase Dawn’s environment. The downloadable demo of A New Dawn will be released on GeForce.com later this month and you’ll need a GeForce GTX 690 or two GTX 600 series GPUs to fully experience the demo.
The original Dawn demo was the first to show a fully credible, 3D character in real time. The Nalu demo added detailed, physically simulated hair. The Adrianne Curry demo pushed the limits of realism in skin shading. A New Dawn demo is a synthesis of all of these demos, as well as over a decade of techniques and advancement made in the realm of realtime 3D graphics. It may not look ten times as good as the original, but from the perspective of a game developer, it’s actually a lot more feasible to implement. There are no unreasonable tradeoffs, such as eliminating the environment and putting the GPU to work on a single character. The new Dawn lives in a world as rich and complex as herself. Let’s hope games catch up to her real soon.
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