Nvidia's "A new Dawn" DX11 demo released

[fellix]

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.

Fast forward ten years, and NVIDIA has brought back Dawn once again, in a demo simply titled "A New Dawn". 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 map—a 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.

Because hair is so thin, aliasing is a major problem. Traditional antialiasing doesn't work well here, as a strand is often smaller than a pixel and may not be picked up by any of the four-or-so sample points. To alleviate this problem, A New Dawn has a special hair smoothing shader that inspects each strand and blurs them in the combing direction. The final result looks soft and silky, as if she just jumped out of the shower after an extensive conditioner routine.

Dawn's skin has also received a complete overhaul. Human skin is one of the trickiest materials to simulate. Unlike a concrete object that only absorbs or transmits light, human skin is more akin to a block of jelly; light enters, jiggles around in multiple layers of skin and flesh, and exits in a new direction. The technique used to simulate this complex series of interactions is called sub-surface scattering.

The original Dawn demo used a very simple but effective technique to simulate one aspect of skin shading called rim lighting. It worked by isolating the silhouette of the character and letting light from behind the character bleed through, giving an illusion of translucent skin. This worked well for the silhouette when exposed to strong light, but was less convincing for other portions of the character.

A New Dawn uses a complex but efficient sub-surface scattering shader, first pioneered with the Luna demo introduced with the GeForce 7800 GTX. To smartly manage workload, the new skin shader dynamically selects the number of samples to filter, depending on how visible the surface is. Detail maps are used to capture fine hairs, bumps, and skin imperfections. Four independent textures describe the oil content of the skin.

Source and Links

 

[mczak]

Hmm any reason the site is saying it needs GTX670/680 and not just any DX11 card? Just for performance reasons or something else?

 

[Silanda]

Hmm any reason the site is saying it needs GTX670/680 and not just any DX11 card? Just for performance reasons or something else?

Just performance I think. It'll run on Fermi GPUs but unless you have a sli setup you'll be looking at single digit frame rates.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Will we need a vendor ID hack to run it on AMD hardware?

 

[PowerK]

Nice graphics.
However, the demo doesn't seem to utilize more than 2 GPUs at the moment. GPU1 & GPU2 utilization hovers well above 95% while GPU3 and GPU4 are at 0%. Most likely this will be solved via their profile update.

Here're some screenshots at 2560x1600

 

[Grall]

Why is everything so bloody dark?

Also, sexism and heteroconformity in the computer gaming industry continues to be rife. Why is it that as soon as you want to demonstrate your pretty graphics the go-to target is some whory lady dressed in nothing but underwear? Dawn looks as if she's had her tits enlarged even more than last time Nvidia hauled her out. Pretty stale imagery overall IMO.

 

[UniversalTruth]

I don't see what so nice about the graphics you find. How realistic could be a simple animation? To me it doesn't look bad but it shows nothing connected with reality.
I don't think 3D Mark 05 looks much worse.

And given how poorly optimised it is, resulting in these tremendous, expensive (hardware wise) requirements, then in my eyes it is a big MEH.

And please, don't post so large images.

 

[Colourless]

Eww, creepy smile

 

[DuckThor Evil]

I get around 22fps on average with a single 680 at stock settings in ultra mode (1080p). FPS hovers between 16-30. Motion is so slow that it feels quite smooth.

 

[lanek]

Will we need a vendor ID hack to run it on AMD hardware?

Here you go .. yes it work .. performance are not really good but absolutely no visual glitches or something who miss.
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=366395

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Anyone tried to limit tesselation through the CP on AMD cards to see what effect that has on the framerate?

Regards,
SB

 

[lanek]

Anyone tried to limit tesselation through the CP on AMD cards to see what effect that has on the framerate?

Regards,
SB

- Framerate wise, there's not a difference you can see ( maybe 1fps, but as the fps vary from 21-22-23fps ( with the girl so, after you hit return and you can move the camera )...

- But visually, there's a difference on the hair.. the hair are extremely dark, but if you cut the tesselation by CP, it seems there's less hair and no reflect on it... its hard to know if there's less hair or it is so dark you dont see them. but there's an impact visually.

 

[AlexV]

I've moved most of the noise (if I missed any please nudge) into RPSC where it belongs. Please don't bring it back unless it magically morphs into "A says: Why do all of these DX11 demos feature a huge count of primitives and not much else, that's a clearly an objectification of the triangle!; B: something about there being also advanced rendering techniques employed.; C: this is how it runs on my hw". For those that want to follow the prior train, RPSC and its dragons await.