NVIDIA revealed DirectX 11 technology demonstrations at GDC

NvIDIA showed off some DirectX 11 graphics simulations at last week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This include a tech demo of hair simulation, realistic waves, and a demonstration of 3.5 million blades of grass billowing and waving in the wind.

In the DirectX 11 hair demonstration, long flowing hair is realistically simulated, created and rendered on the GeForce GTX 480 using its unique parallel tessellation engines. By moving the model and applying a simulated breeze, the hair billows and cascades naturally with accurate physical properties. The demo shows how realistic hair will soon be possible in computer games.

Our DirectX 11 “Island” demo depicts a large scene that includes terrain and water with realistic, physically simulated waves. The terrain uses DirectX 11 tessellation and supports both static and dynamic tessellation. Very little data is sent to the GPU—with default settings the GPU creates 11 million primitives out of 20,000 that it gets from the application. At maximum tessellation settings the simulation can draw nearly 1.6 billion triangles per second. The demo runs at over 40 frames per second on NVIDIA’s next-generation GeForce GTX 480 GPU.

The grass demonstration portrays up to 3.5 million blades of grass billowing and waving in the wind. Simulations like this put NVIDIA’s next-generation GPU to the test as it renders up to 48 million triangles in a single frame. This simulation also uses DirectX 11 tessellation to deliver more detail when viewing the grass up close.

These simulations illustrate the kind of scenes that can be depicted using the highly scalable tessellation engines in GeForce GTX 480. With NVIDIA’s newest GPU, game developers can incorporate an extraordinary level of geometric detail in their upcoming games.

Here are two wave screenshots that illustrate the enhanced details provided by DX11 tessellation:



And below is a screenshot of a DirectX 11 grass simulation demo: