Brigs Lab's

When a chip man­u­fac­turer releases a new gen­er­a­tion of graph­ics cards, the appro­pri­ate tech­nol­ogy demon­stra­tions (or tech demos) have become more or less oblig­a­tory. They are sup­posed to show the fea­tures and capa­bil­i­ties of the new devices — even if sim­i­lar games don’t exist. There­fore Nvidia intro­duced diverse new tech demos in course of the GF100 Fermi launch. Two fea­tures, DirectX 11 Tes­sel­la­tion and Ray Trac­ing, are the most impor­tant ones. And here we can take took a look at the new tech demos and presents in form of screen­shots and videos.

Fermi tech demo: Super­sonic Sled
In Super­sonic Sled the impor­tant objects aren’t only mod­eled with Physx, but Nvidia also uses the DirectX 11 Tes­sel­la­tion fea­ture to cre­ate a detailed back­ground scene. If used incor­rectly, the sled can fall apart, the pilot can be sent fly­ing through the air or do the wildest acro­bat­ics. Or the exhaust stream is affected by the ther­mal shields.

It is said that due to the sim­u­lated vibra­tions of the engine, which is con­tin­u­ously chang­ing the phys­i­cal sta­tus, there won’t be two iden­ti­cal runs. When ask­ing Sean Cleve­land (at the begin­ning of the video) we learned that although there are three Geforce GF100s in the test sys­tem, only one of them is used to run the tech demo. In the wire­frame mode with active visual dis­play of the Physx objects includ­ing the vec­tors, the demo is lag­ging notice­ably from time to time — but not if the nor­mal dis­play mode is active. A new ver­sion of the demo, which has not been shown pub­licly, solved the lag problem.

[Fermi tech demo: Optix Ray Trac­ing
With the Fermi archi­tec­ture launch at the GTC 2009 Nvidia showed a Ray Trac­ing demo based on the in-house Optix Engine. Nvidia com­pared the demo on two sys­tems one pow­ered by the GF100 and one with a Geforce GTX 285 (right dis­play). On the Fermi card the demo was run­ning at 1920 x 1080 with up to five light refrac­tions (Bounces) per ray.

Fermi tech demo: Hair Ren­der­ing
In this tech demo Nvidia com­bines Tes­sel­la­tion, Geom­e­try and Com­pute Shaders to cal­cu­late real­is­tic hair. By the way: Demos deal­ing with hair have quite a tra­di­tion at Nvidia

Fermi tech demo: Water Demo
In this demo Nvidia uses the GF100 to shows the advan­tages of DirectX 11 Tes­sel­la­tion. Not only the water, but also the sur­faces of the islands are formed with a wire­frame model, which is inde­pen­dent to the dis­tance and can be refined on the graph­ics chip.