Remember 10 years ago when nVidia debuted Dawn, their tech-demo a real-time rendered fairy that showed off the “cinematic computing” power of its new Geforce FX range of cards? I do; soon after that I replaced my aging GeForce 4 Ti 4400, by plonking down a month’s salary on a GeForce FX 5950 – primarily so I could run the thing. Even though it utilises old tech, I’m not sure I’ve seen a real-time rendered character so lifelike in modern games. They’ve now given Dawn a DirectX11 makeover to show off their Kepler-based GPUs.
Here’s are the major improvements to the demo
- Instead of the 1700 strands of hair seen in the original demo, Dawn’s head now sports 40 000 tessellated hairs.
- 4 million triangles make up her forest-dwelling, as opposed to the six textures that made up her previous home
- Dawn’s skin is now rendered using sub-surface scattering, which allows light t penetrate it before bouncing off – making her look more natural, and less…glowing.
You will, of course, need some rather powerful hardware to run A New Dawn. Here’s what you’ll need to be packing:
- GPU: GTX 670 or 680 (GTX 670 SLI, GTX 680 SLI, or GTX 690 recommended for Ultra mode)
- CPU: 2.5GHz Dual-Core or higher
- System Memory: 4GB
- Disk Space: 2GB
- Operating System: Windows 7 or Vista
It’s a 800Mb download, and you can grab it straight from Nvidia. Or, perhaps, if you don’t meet the minimum specs required for entry, you could just watch it here. Next gen? It’s already here.
Last Updated: July 24, 2012