Attention Apollo 11 conspiracy theorists: Chipmaker Nvidia has used the latest in computer graphics technology to recreate Neil Armstrong's famous photograph of Buzz Aldrin hopping off the lunar lander, and it provides a pretty good indication that Neil and Buzz were indeed on the moon.

You can see the company's handiwork in the 10-minute video above. Moon-hoax believers say Armstrong's photos are fake—because no stars are visible in the background and the lighting in the photos seems too good to be believable—but by painstakingly modeling the lighting conditions on the moon, NVidia engineers were able to match Armstrong's photo almost perfectly.

The project started in July, when Nvidia was exploring ways of showing off the new graphics chip Maxwell, which went on sale last week. It cooked up a demo using a standard graphics simulation called the Sponza Atrium, a computer-generated stroll through a renaissance-style hallway. Graphics geeks like this because it can highlight subtleties in computer-generated lighting and effects. But CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was unimpressed. "Come on," he said. "We can do better."

So a team of engineers recreated the Armstrong photo.

As it happens, modeling a moon photo is easier than recreating a photo taken here on earth, says Mark Daly, Nvidia's senior director of content development. "There's absolutely nothing to diffuse the light," he says. "Had we tried to do a similar thing on earth, it would have been much harder."

Nvidia's new chips use something called Voxel Global Illumination technology to accelerate highly subtle light effects in real time. In short, it can calculate how light bounces off objects, adding a richer, more lifelike sense of luminosity to game graphics. But it also can handle a true simulation of a moon photograph. Engineers used VXGI and publicly available data about the luminosity of the objects on the moon to determine how light bouncing off of the lunar surface and the lunar lander would appear, and whether you'd see stars in the photo. As it turns out, you wouldn't. They're washed out by the light in the image.

At first, the project missed a critical light source, but then hey made amends. The engineers could tell something was missing in an early simulation, and they didn't realize what it was until they spotted a glaring white object in one of NASA's videos. "The sun and the light coming off of the moon's surface are doing the majority of the work, but there's probably a 10ish-percentage of additional light coming off of Neil Armstrong's space suit."

Daly thinks Nvidia's simulation is pretty good, but he admits it isn't perfect. It doesn't, for example, account for secondary light bounces like the light from Armstrong's suit that is then reflected off of the lunar surface. "In the perfect world, if we could have modeled multiple bounces of light," he says. "I think it would have been even closer to the photo that Neil Armstrong took."

No doubt, that will give the conspiracy theorists reason to keep believing.