Epic Demos Samaritan on Nvidia's Next-Gen Kepler GPU
During this years Game Developers Conference, Epic showed the infamous Samaritan Demo running on Nvidia's Next-Generation Kepler GPU.
At the 2011 GDC conference, Epic introduced the Samaritan demo, which provided users a look at the next generation of videogame graphics. The demo utilized a host of advanced rendering techniques to create a realistic environment. The issue with the demo in 2011 was it took three GeForce GTX 580s to run the demo in real-time. At this years GDC, Epic showed the demo utilizing only one next-generation Nvidia Kepler GPU.
In addition to the power of the Kepler GPU, we see the benefit of Nvidia-developed anti-aliasing technique, Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA), aimed to improve upon the established success of Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA), the form of anti-aliasing most commonly seen in today’s games. FXAA is used to smooth out jagged edges and improve visual fidelity, and anti-aliasing is key to creating the incredible sights of Samaritan.
"Without anti-aliasing, Samaritan’s lighting pass uses about 120MB of GPU memory. Enabling 4x MSAA consumes close to 500MB, or a third of what's available on the GTX 580. This increased memory pressure makes it more challenging to fit the demo’s highly detailed textures into the GPU’s available VRAM, and led to increased paging and GPU memory thrashing, which can sometimes decrease framerates. FXAA is a shader-based anti-aliasing technique,” however, and as such “doesn't require additional memory so it's much more performance friendly for deferred renderers such as Samaritan,” according to Ignacio Llamas, a Senior Research Scientist at Nvidia who worked with Epic on the FXAA implementation.
As reported earlier, we recently saw the first images of the Nvidia GK104 Kepler card and now we are starting to see some visual performance benefits with Kepler. Most reports have Kepler slated for releasing later this month, though still no official word from Nvidia yet.
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bloodymaze If this is what we can expect from Kepler... I am all for it, drive the prices down on the AMD and we "the consumer" are very happy and fortunate to have two powerhouse GPU makers...Reply
VERY good graphics in that vid by the way... I'm very impressed. -
hellfire24 like always nvidia is impressive but this time they keep their prices very competitive.Reply
go nvidia go! -
rantoc And in later news, epic releases a shooter game with low textures, weak overall visuals and no game control value at all because it is "optimized" for consoles but ofcorse while demoing what could been done they use PC as its the only option!Reply -
maxinexus Amen to that bloodymaze. If all the rumors are true(GTX680 with~40% higher performance than 7970 and 670 with 20% over 7970) and priced at 549.99 and 449.99 that will cause AMD prices to freefall. 7970 $399 7950 $299 7870 $249 7850 $199 7770 $149 7750 $99Reply
This would be awesome for all of us...these prices would be fair :) Anyway, let's hope kepler will deliver...for all we know this could be 690 card runing this demo so we do not know only hope it is 680... -
rocknrollz I saw this video around 3 months ago.Reply
Also, the video is just that a video. Not real game play.
But honestly, I expect good things from Kepler. Cannot wait to see its benchmarks!
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