The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) opened on March 4th with a big bang, with Weta Digital, Epic Games, Oculusand NVIDIA unveiled this morning with an extraordinary virtual reality experience called “Thief in the Shadows”. Sound familiar? That’s because Thief in the Shadows is from the movie The Hobbit. The product of a unique collaboration has brought the most advanced GPU ever built, the GeForce GTX TITAN X, which was unveiled by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in a surprise guest-appearance alongside Epic Games’ CEO and founder, Tim Sweeney at the Epic Games keynote. Tim announced that the VR capabilities using Maxwell technologies, pushing the response time boundaries as well as low-persistence that can cause motion sickness if went unchecked.
“Thief in the Shadows” was created by Weta Digital, the talent behind the Hobbit movies. The demo was used leveraging Oculus’ “Crescent Bay” prototype as well as the muscle of a TITAN X GPU. 90 frames have never been so beautiful — so close to your face — using Unreal Engine 4 technology.
“When you come face-to-face with an enormous dragon that experience has to be believable, visceral and emotional,” “NVIDIA’s new TITAN X GPUs provide the platform to deliver exactly that.”
— Alasdair Coull, Head of R&D, Weta Digital
“‘Thief in the Shadows’ would not exist without NVIDIA’s support and amazing hardware,” “Together with Unreal Engine 4 and Oculus Crescent Bay, these three pieces of technology place the viewer inside a virtual world of unparalleled detail and action.”
— Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder, Epic Games
The TITAN X has 12GB VRAM and has a density of eight billion transistors. The Maxwell architecture that NVIDIA recently released is set to contend with the latest and greatest from AMD, who have yet to respond. The TITAN X was brandished with a host incredible GeForce-powered VR demos, which NVIDIA has unveild alongside their VR Direct software, supporting VR SLI and asynchronous time warp (ATW). TITAN Xs in SLI may seem like overkill but when you consider running two displays within a VR helmet at the highest resolution possible, NVIDIA VR SLI is here to destroy boundaries and unlock the best graphics performance available.
A little more on what ATW is, it is a technique for reducing persistence by adjusting the image based on head-tracking unput. The NVIDIA drivers will provide API for GPU scheduling controls for effective implementation.
Here’s what people had to say about CRYENGINE’S VR Demo Reactions at GDC 2015:
A few days back, on March 4th when NVIDIA opened up their PhysX Code to Unreal Engine 4 developers, which means we will finally be able to see some amazing PhysX technology alongside the Maxwell architecture. I don’t know about you guys, but PhysX is awesome, this is Epic Games’ implementation of PhysX with the power and beauty of Unreal Engine 4 (This animation was rendered in real time, not a prerecording):
Here are some other amazing implementations of PhysX and why I am such a die-hard NVIDIA/ASUS fan boy.
Personally, I do not have the cash or money to grab a TITAN X or even see any logical explanation on why I would want one. As a competitive who just needs smooth frames and acceptable quality, a GTX 960 would suffice for my everyday fragging needs. But, after seeing that “Kite” demo, it makes want to sell my kidney for a rig with the TITAN X in it. There need not be any logical explanation to get one, the only reason you need is the joy of experiencing such beauty in such fluidity at insane resolutions. You may never need to leave the house ever again.
For more information, head on over to NVIDIA’s newsroom.
