NVIDIA is showing its next generation DirectX 11 graphics simulations at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. The new simulations include beautifully rendered hair and an island simulation with sunlight reflecting on photorealistic waves.

In the DirectX 11 hair demonstration, long flowing hair is realistically simulated, created and rendered on the GeForce GTX 480 using its unique parallel tessellation engines. By moving the model and applying a simulated breeze, the hair billows and cascades naturally with accurate physical properties. The demo shows how realistic hair will soon be possible in computer games.

Our DirectX 11 “Island” demo depicts a large scene that includes terrain and water with realistic, physically simulated waves. The terrain uses DirectX 11 tessellation and supports both static and dynamic tessellation. Very little data is sent to the GPU—with default settings the GPU creates 11 million primitives out of 20,000 that it gets from the application. At maximum tessellation settings the simulation can draw nearly 1.6 billion triangles per second. The demo runs at over 40 frames per second on NVIDIA’s next-generation GeForce GTX 480 GPU.

The grass demonstration portrays up to 3.5 million blades of grass billowing and waving in the wind. Simulations like this put NVIDIA’s next-generation GPU to the test as it renders up to 48 million triangles in a single frame. This simulation also uses DirectX 11 tessellation to deliver more detail when viewing the grass up close.

These simulations illustrate the kind of scenes that can be depicted using the highly scalable tessellation engines in GeForce GTX 480. With NVIDIA’s newest GPU, game developers can incorporate an extraordinary level of geometric detail in their upcoming games.

CAPTIONS – All images captured on GeForce GTX 480

Hair has been one of the most challenging objects to create in video games, due to the computational complexity of realistically rendering thousands of individual strands as they interact with light and each other. In this DirectX 11 technology simulation created by NVIDIA, long flowing hair is rendered in amazing detail with realistic physics properties in real time.

Island before and after: These two images show the dramatically enhanced details provided by DirectX 11 tessellation. The before view shows the minimal level of detail included in the actual simulation; the after view shows how DirectX 11 tessellation adds millions of triangles to make the simulation come to life with photorealistic water and non-repeating waves.

The NVIDIA DirectX 11 grass simulation depicts more than 3.5 million blades of grass waving and billowing in the wind. The physical properties of the grass are affected by objects placed upon them. Once again, DirectX 11 tessellation adds greater visual fidelity when viewing the grass close up.