NVIDIA releases GeForce 8800GTX, 8800GTS, 680i, 680a

Demonstrations
Three demos were shown off at the press tour in Taipei – the first being Cascades, a procedurally generated spiral rock column of which had no end, so you could comfortably pan up and down infinitely. All the equations for this were done on card, meaning the CPU didn't feel a thing. Instanced dragonflies buzzed around – instancing has received a bit of an overhaul in DX10 allowing greater efficiency and variability between instances, so NVIDIA was keen to show this. The scene could be rotated and zoomed in any direction, and clicking on any point of the rock would start a waterfall – the most incredible waterfall you've seen. A shader darkens the rock and enhances the specular lighting to make it look wet, particles of water start flying down from the point of origin, it hits the ground and a mist shader begins (increasing in volume dependent on how far down and how large the waterfall is). The water flows around obstacles wherever it hits, obeys gravity, pools in crevices, splits the drops further apart the further you are down the waterfall as in real life, and when you switch it off runs off the scene, perfectly aware of how much volume needs to be gotten rid of. A drying shader then begins on the rocks to return them to their normal hue.

It looked the tiniest bit unnatural in terms of flowing downhill (it appeared to be 'floating' above the terrain a little, most likely due to following actual geometry rather than the bump mapped result), but is simply unrivalled to what we've seen so far.

Cascades showed off how impressive shaders have become since the GeForce 3.

Next was 'Froggy', a scene featuring a frog on a log in a bog. Well, a lake, anyway. The purpose was to show off geometry shaders, both in shadows and the ability to do mesh distortions – particularly the frog's expanding throat as it croaked. Light cast from a lantern created geometrically accurate shapes, and you can pull selected bits of the frog's mesh to distort it, like the lips, throat, eyelids and body, and then freeze the distortion in place.

More impressive for 3D geeks is the fact that both the frog's eyes were entirely raytraced in real time.

The frog actually looks at you angrily when you start distorting his body. Those eyes are 100% raytraced too.

Finally there was 'smoke in a box', as a ball of smoke flew around in a glass box under its own impetus, dashing itself against the glass, its trails disappearing in liquid flame Disney-esque styled fashion. It was certainly an impressive display of smoke physics, however the alpha around the edges didn't seem quite right, and it occasionally discoloured beyond monochromatic for some undefinable reason. Mind you this isn't so much a slight on the card as on the effect itself, and overall it showed huge promise for future games.

Miss Playboy, February 2006
NVIDIA also showed off its incomplete 'Adrienne' demo, in which America's Next Top Model 2003 winner Adrienne Curry has been rendered by the card. While there's some way to go in completing the demo, it's certainly impressive, complete with modifiers for expressions (using geometry tessellation for subtle effect), an oily skin filter and reflections and colour shifts in the hair. In fact 3D graphics have now gotten to the point that since nothing looks noticeably out of place, we have to keep reminding ourselves that the image is impressive and is not simply every day normal vision.

The Adrienne demo was still unfinished, but represented a ridiculous amount of power with the face and animations being rendered in real time.

Of course all of this is based on a demonstration given by NVIDIA (who by the way claim an average 2.0x performance increase over the 7900GTX) – so expect actual testing and hard evidence to be covered in Atomic magazine shortly.