Nvidia's upcoming Kepler recently ran Epic's Samaritan demo, which was developed to showcase Unreal Engine 3 and the potential video game graphics technology in future video games. This specific demo, which took place last week at GDC, did not employ the usual triple GTX 580 (Fermi) configuration, but ran based on a single Kepler-based graphics chip. It was unclear which Kepler chip was used, but Nvidia's note clearly suggests that we should anticipate Kepler being about three times faster than Fermi, at least in some applications.
"Although no further information on Kepler was given, the demo sent a clear message: the graphics in Samaritan, generally regarded as a glimpse of the gaming industry’s far-off future, will in fact be possible in the near future on PC systems running a single next-generation graphics card," Nvidia wrote. The demo also showed Nvidia's proprietary Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA) technology, which builds on top of Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA), "the form of anti-aliasing most commonly seen in today’s games."
the rumor mill is adding bits and pieces every day. For example, Fudzilla recently reported that the GK104 Kepler chip may be faster than AMD's Radeon HD 7970, which suggests that Nvidia has a shot at gaining the lead in this battle. There are even some early product shots of Kepler cards to keep the early traction for Nvidia going. Of course, rumors will help Nvidia so much. Next month, Nvidia will have to prove whether the early praise was justified or not.
