1 – Overview
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:
——————————-• 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
2 – Screenshots
You can download the demo HERE (250MB).
More big screenshots here, at Geeks3D’s Big Pictures:
NVIDIA Endless City GTX 580 Tech-Demo (15 pictures total).
I tested the demo with a 3-way SLI of GeForce GTX 480 and with a 2-way SLI of GTX 460. The demo runs fine BUT does not support SLI 🙁
3-way SLI of GTX 480: only one GPU is used!
UPDATE
I must be a bit tired but it was enough to select the SLI AFR1 (Alternate Frame Rendering 1) mode instead of NVIDIA Recommended (useless recommendation NV! Same kind of pb with FurMark!!).
2-way SLI of GTX 460: works fine with AFR1 mode
MSI Afterburner GPU usage monitoring
And Radeon HD 5000 / HD 6000 owners ? The demo doesn’t work on AMD cards:
Anti Cayman routine!
Either the demo uses some CUDA code (perhaps for the procedurally generated city) or NVIDIA has just limited the demo to GeForce GTX 400 and GTX 500. Actually, I don’t know if it’s important, because… how can I say… NVIDIA has produced better tech demos.
Here is a nice video and I don’t know why, the rendering looks better on this video. Maybe the GTX580-touch?
[youtube 5ucfF204zYI]
This scene: GTX 480 around 30FPS and GTX 460 around 15FPS
The city by night
The city by night
Tessellation disabled (key 7)
Tessellation enabled (key 9)
Tessellation disabled (key 7)
Tessellation enabled (key 9)
Tessellation disabled (key 7)
Tessellation enabled (key 9)
Ooops! There’s a little problem with the fog…
Global view of the city
The LOD in action!
Global view of the city
Tessellation disabled (key 7)
Tessellation enabled (key 9)
The city with the day light
A small benchmark mode for the next update would be cool…
Hopefully this demo motivates ATI to release their own new “Mecha Rampage Radeon HD6800 Tech-Demo”…
Yes if got a lot of geometry detail then you don’t need a lot of textures is that it, looks like something from http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/
Open NVIDIA CONTROL PANEL and create a profile for this demo…
Use “Alternate frame rendering 1” (or 2) for the main EndlessCity64.exe and/or EndlessCity.exe
So SLI is enabled.
http://i51.tinypic.com/28rjpg6.jpg
Thanks Zibri, it’s okay now. Actually no need to create a profile, selecting the SLI AFR1 mode is enough.
@Zibri: article updated.
so how about some score update on those 3-way SLI of GeForce GTX 480 and with a 2-way SLI of GTX 460 ? 🙂
every nvidia realse their highend grapich card the ati fanboy like above hope ati will be better from nvidia card. lol..
I don’t know why it is a problem, if a NVIDIA techdemo doesn’t work on the ATI cards. After all this is an NVIDIA techdemo…
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The youtube video looks better because it was rendering on a rendering cluster of a bunch 480 gtx’s if im not mistaken, and not a single 580gtx so they added extra eye candy for sure.
rolma at the wireframes! Really dense 🙂
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Well.. you could at least quote me in the post 🙂
Anyhow after some testing (this demo is awful) I noticed it to be much faster with AFR2 than AFR1.
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The textures look awful they should fire their texture artists
I downloaded the demo (I have a GTX480) but it doesn’t work.
When I open the file endlesscity.exe it gives an error…
What could it be?
Corrupted download? Wrong NVIDIA drivers (I tested with 260.99 WHQL or 261.00 beta, can’t remember)?
Boo nvidia seems alot of there tech demo’s are nvidia only next time make one that both sides can run and compare perf/quality
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Athlonite said: “Boo nvidia seems alot of there tech demo’s are nvidia only next time make one that both sides can run and compare perf/quality”
It wouldn’t work. Nvidia would propably enable use of CUDA, so AMD cards would lose eitherway :/ . It’s just marketing.
ovan said: “every nvidia realse their highend grapich card the ati fanboy like above hope ati will be better from nvidia card. lol..”
And who is going all fanboy here? I don’t give a damn about AMD or Nvidia, i just buy the card that have beter price/performance relation.
nvidia dont want ati cards to run their tech demos coz theyre afraid ati cards will run thoe much better than their own cards .lolol
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Well, this demo now works on AMD cards, and no, nVidia has nothing to be afraid of here.