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RealFlow has a great SIGGRAPH Demo Reel up on YouTube, showing some of the great work they’ve done for TV, Movies, and commercials over the last year or so.  You’ll recognize lots of soft drink commercials, body wash commercials, and a few big movie and video game scenes.  Check it out above.

Update 9/2: Seems RealFlow pulled the original video, I replaced it with the new version. Only different I see right away is new music.
via Siggraph 2011 Showreel – YouTube.

Graphics demo, realflow, reel, siggraph

To demonstrate the raw power of the new AMD Radeon 6900 series  video cards, AMD has a new Tech Demo that, at least from the description, seems to utilize every buzzword and fancy graphics trick of 2010.

The HK-2207 real-time demo features a number of post processing effects (depth-of-field, lens flare, ghosting, aerial perspective/atmospheric, LUT, emissive and reflection) provided as an easy approach for developers and artists to adopt Microsoft® DirectX® 11 programming. This demo also uses a current trend in game engines utilizing deferred lighting and deferred shading allowing many more lights and rapid prototyping. A newly developed GPU accelerated physics particle system is introduced utilizing DX11 DirectCompute. Bullet Physics is used with a new fracture/destruction approach that also features procedurally generated unique debris leveraging DX11 tessellation.

Even though it’s from AMD, reports say that it actually runs pretty well on the NVidia Fermi cards. (35fps on GTX480′s).

via Radeon™ HD 6900 Series Graphics Real-Time Demo.

Science amd, demo, nvidia

Those of you with Fermi-cards can head on over to NVidia’s site to download the new ‘Endless City’ DX11 Tessellation demo.  They demo’ed this at GTC a few weeks back and it really is amazing to see how far they can push the tessellation in the new hardware.

Let the machines take over!

Our Endless City demo starts with a few dozen building blocks and uses an L-System to assemble these into complex structures, buildings, whole city blocks, and finally a sprawling and boundless megalopolis.

At any given time, there are hundreds of thousands of on-screen objects. The super-efficient NVIDIA® Tessellation engine scales the number of polygons for each object according to its surface detail and proximity to the camera . . . real-time,

high-resolution displacement.

So while you enjoy a leisurely glide through the city, the NVIDIA® GeForce® powering your flight will be churning through over 600 million polygons per second. Better yet, there will still be enough power to keep the lights running . . . hundreds of thousands of them, all lighting the scene dynamically.

All you need to do is sit back and enjoy the view.

Highlights of the demo include:

——————————-

• Tessellation enables a continuous ramp on the level of detail, more than doubling the total triangle count and providing up to a 500x increase in detail on the nearest objects.

• Three dimensional displacement maps allow greater detail than simple height maps.

• The demo positions and renders over 600 million triangles per second with a single GPU.

• The city is procedurally generated. The buildings are constructed from a small set of objects into a city of complex structures using a set of rules called an L-system.

• In the area surrounding the viewer, over a million meshes are arranged by the L-system, including roughly 500,000 light sources.

• As the viewer moves, the demo endlessly (hence the name) generates more of the city to keep the viewer surrounded by buildings.

• The L-system randomly selects elements to assemble so each block looks different from the last but if you return to a place you saw before, it’ll regenerate the same buildings you saw previously.

• Split screen rendering modes operate in eye space so they look correct in 3D Vision.

• Screen-space ambient occlusion enables high quality shading on randomly generated and dynamic geometry which cannot be accomplished with precomputed texture maps.

• Dynamic lighting on everything; can shift from day to night.

Recommended System:

——————-

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 500 series GPU

2.6 GHz Quad core CPU

4 GB System memory

300 MB Hard drive space

Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7

via [TEST] NVIDIA Endless City: GTX 580 DX11 Tech-Demo – 3D Tech News, Pixel Hacking, Data Visualization and 3D Programming – Geeks3D.com.

Graphics demo, nvidia

Rastergrid is back with more details for their OpenGL4.0 Mountains demo, this time time they update the occlusion culling algorithm to utilitize the Hierarchical-Z buffer technology in new OpenGL4.0 spec.

Occlusion culling is a visibility determination algorithm that is used to identify those objects that did reside in the view volume but still aren’t visible on the screen due to occlusion. That means they are hidden by such objects that reside closer to the camera.

via Hierarchical-Z map based occlusion culling « RasterGrid Blog.

Science demo, opengl

With the 2011 applications on the horizon, Autodesk has released their public 2010 Show Reel.

This Autodesk Show Reel illustrates the company’s leadership in 2D and 3D design technology by showcasing incredible customer work in the fields of architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, automotive, and media and entertainment.

Enjoy!

Graphics autodesk, demo, reel

Intel has a new “Visual Computing” demo online called ‘TickerTape’, which makes use of DirectX10 and the new Intel Core i7 processor capabilities.

Ticker Tape is a tech demo that showcases complex particle movement using aerodynamic calculations such as lift and drag. This is all done at high framerates by utilizing an n-way threaded framework and SIMD optimizations. Included in the demo is the capability to dynamically vary the number of threads and usage of SSE so the benefits of both can be easily seen.

Source code and binaries are available on their site, but you’ll have to be on Windows 7 or Vista, with a DX10 compliant video card.

via TickerTape – Intel® Software Network.

Science demo, intel

A pair of impressive demonstrations running on the NVidia GF100 show some neat CUDA simulations running with the new and improved hardware.

First is a Fluid Splashing Demo:

Then a Real-Time hair demo:

Hardware cuda, demo, fermi, gf100, nvidia

I missed this when it was originally published earlier this week, but Guru3D has video and information on a new demo that NVidia is showing off with their Fermi based products: the SuperSonic Sled.

Personally I feel that SuperSonic Rocket Sled is the best demo NVIDIA has ever made. We've seen and done all the facial animations, dusks, dawns and what not. What you are seeing with the SuperSonic Sled demo is pretty amazing as the demo is very rich in objects, triangle count, quality textures, complex shaders, depth of field, but more so massive volumetric particles and liquid PhysX implementations and very rich geometric detail thanks to the hardware tessellation functionality embedded into the GF100 GPU. So from a technology point of view, this is the most advanced demo NVIDIA has ever designed.

Now, I’m sure there is a lot of smoke and mirrors going on here, as anyone who’s had experience with real-time graphics can attest.  Focus-directed level of detail, variable resolutions, etc, but still it’s very impressive.  The graphics are of such quality that I personally have difficulty believing that it’s actually rendered real-time, it looks like a professional MentalRay rendering (interesting side note, NVidia owns MentalRay now).

I really hope NVidia doesn’t keep this to themselves, and releases it to the public along with the GF100 cards.  See the partial video of the demo below (They were not allowed to record the full demo).

Not sure how, but the guys at PCGamesHardware have a much longer video (almost 5 minutes) showing not only the “full run” of the poor pilot, but the various interactive and wireframe features of the demo, proving that it’s entirely interactive and not a movie.

via NVIDIA GF100 (Fermi) Technology preview.

Update: Brian Burke confirms that it will be downloadable.

Hardware demo, fermi, nvidia

AMD’s Developer Central has been updated with a pair of new demos showcasing some of what’s possible in DirectX11 with the new Radeon HD5800 cards.  First is the “Mecha Demo”:

The Mecha demo shows the results of a new approach to rendering semi-transparent objects without pre-sorting, known as order-independent transparency (OIT). It is made possible by the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series of graphics processors and the new features of Microsoft® DirectX® 11 technology. Blending is an order-dependent operation that requires sorting objects before rendering them. Atomic operations and append buffers make it possible to construct per-pixel fragment lists and sort them on the GPU. The results are a significant increase in speed and accuracy over those possible with traditional techniques.

Second is the “Ladybug Demo”:

The Ladybug demo shows the results of a new approach to simulating lens-accurate depth-of-field effects based on real-world parameters of focal length and focus distance. This technique is made possible by the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series of graphics processors and the Microsoft® DirectX® 11 and Direct Compute 11 technologies. Depth-of-field is used in feature films by cinematographers to subtly guide a viewer’s attention through a shot or to heighten the emotion of a scene. This technique finally provides developers with a way to achieve the same effects and bring new levels of cinematic realism to their games. This approach is enabled by features such as atomic operations and shared memory.

If you’ve got the necessary hardware & software, hit their website for the EXE’s to see for yourself.  Otherwise, hit their website to download the H264 HD movies showing what you’re missing.

ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series Graphics Real-Time Demos.

Hardware ati, demo, directx11

Maxwell has released a free trial-version of their Maxwell Renderer for you to “try before you buy”.  The demo version has a 30 day time limit, and a few other necessary restrictions:

• Watermarked render
• Maximum render size of 800 x 600 pixels
• Network rendering disabled *
• Preview Rendering in viewport in Maxwell Studio disabled
• A limit of 5 editable lights when using Multilight™

Aside from the small render-size (Personally, I’ld like to test it on 1080p for a realistic benchmark), it’s a pretty full-featured version.  Fill out the form on their website and they’ll send you a demo license.  If you haven’t heard what’s new in the latest Maxwell Render, you can read up on it here.

via Maxwell Render :: Buy – Try Demo and Plug-ins.

Graphics demo, maxwell, software