Endless City is a new tech-demo by NVIDIA for the launch of the new GeForce GTX 580. This is a Direct3D 11 demo with tessellation…

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:

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• 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:

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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