Those of you with Fermi-cards can head on over to NVidia’s site to download the new ‘Endless City’ DX11 Tessellation demo. They demo’ed this at GTC a few weeks back and it really is amazing to see how far they can push the tessellation in the new hardware.
Let the machines take over!
Our Endless City demo starts with a few dozen building blocks and uses an L-System to assemble these into complex structures, buildings, whole city blocks, and finally a sprawling and boundless megalopolis.
At any given time, there are hundreds of thousands of on-screen objects. The super-efficient NVIDIA® Tessellation engine scales the number of polygons for each object according to its surface detail and proximity to the camera . . . real-time,
high-resolution displacement.
So while you enjoy a leisurely glide through the city, the NVIDIA® GeForce® powering your flight will be churning through over 600 million polygons per second. Better yet, there will still be enough power to keep the lights running . . . hundreds of thousands of them, all lighting the scene dynamically.
All you need to do is sit back and enjoy the view.
Highlights of the demo include:
——————————-
• Tessellation enables a continuous ramp on the level of detail, more than doubling the total triangle count and providing up to a 500x increase in detail on the nearest objects.
• Three dimensional displacement maps allow greater detail than simple height maps.
• The demo positions and renders over 600 million triangles per second with a single GPU.
• The city is procedurally generated. The buildings are constructed from a small set of objects into a city of complex structures using a set of rules called an L-system.
• In the area surrounding the viewer, over a million meshes are arranged by the L-system, including roughly 500,000 light sources.
• As the viewer moves, the demo endlessly (hence the name) generates more of the city to keep the viewer surrounded by buildings.
• The L-system randomly selects elements to assemble so each block looks different from the last but if you return to a place you saw before, it’ll regenerate the same buildings you saw previously.
• Split screen rendering modes operate in eye space so they look correct in 3D Vision.
• Screen-space ambient occlusion enables high quality shading on randomly generated and dynamic geometry which cannot be accomplished with precomputed texture maps.
• Dynamic lighting on everything; can shift from day to night.
Recommended System:
——————-
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 500 series GPU
2.6 GHz Quad core CPU
4 GB System memory
300 MB Hard drive space
Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7
