DirectX 10 demo finally released

The world's first $650 non-game tech demo is released.

If you’ve recently invested in an Nvidia 8800 DirectX10 card, and would actually like to see some actual DirectX10 graphics, Nvidia’s just made public the tech demo it wowed journalists with many months ago.

The ‘Cascades’ demo is a fully interactive sample of what we’ll see trickle into games through this year.

According to Nvidia, the demo highlights:

Displacement Mapping: Improved displacement mapping techniques use a simple height map in a complex pixel shader to display detailed cracks and bumps that are able to occlude each other, resulting in an extremely high level of realism on the rock surface.

Dynamic Particle Physics: The GeForce® 8800's geometry shaders perform all of the physics calculations for the water, allowing the waterfalls to collide with the rock surface and to form rivers flowing around the features of the rock. Water particles are generated, propagated, and retired on the GPU, leaving the CPU free to perform other tasks.

Procedural Geometry Creation: Rock structures are not only rendered, but also constructed by the GeForce 8800. This permits the user to move up or down through infinite virtual space, with the GPU continuously streaming out colossal chunks of rock in a wide variety of random shapes.

In other nNews, Nvidia last week made available a 320MB version of its GTS card.

This week Nvidia also finally released WHQL Vista drivers. While SLI for DirectX 10 is not yet supported there’s little call for it. Unless your really need SLI power for the Cascades demo.

The 100.64 drivers can be downloaded here:

32-bit
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_100.64.html

64-bit
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_100.64.html

The Cascades demo can be downloaded here:

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_cascades_home.html