Yesterday Nvidia made a post on their official blog about Square Enix’s Direct X 12 tech demo that was shown at Microsoft Build 2015.
I watched the clip yesterday and my jaw was agape for the whole video. The fact that the scenes are being rendered in real time has left me gobsmacked. I’m serious, I’m utterly flabbergasted.
So much so, that I feel it necessary to pull out the fancy words to describe it.
Video game creators have been striving for a very long time for the ever elusive photo-realistic graphics capabilities that have been foretold for years. I believe we are on the cusp of that happening.
Direct X 12 will launch this summer along with Windows 10. Boasting a number of features, such as the ability to pool together all VRAM from all GPUs in the system, regardless of brand or class. It is with that feature that Square Enix was able to create this lifelike scene in real time.
Pooling the resources of FOUR Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X cards, each with 12GB of VRAM (A staggering 48GB frame buffer), the creators of Final Fantasy have put together the most realistic real-time scene I’ve personally ever even heard of. This is on the level you would expect a render farm to process. Think of playing a Pixar film in real-time.
For a long time there was stagnation in the market. With the previous generation of consoles dragging on as long as they did, game makers were faced with the choice to make a top quality PC game, or make a console game and port it to PC with lesser graphics. Because the customer base was primarily with the older consoles, games for PC suffered. In the last year and a half since the launch of the current generation, we’ve seen serious improvements in game visuals.
Nvidia and AMD finally have reason to push the boundaries of what their hardware can do. I believe that we’re about to see a meteoric change in graphics capability, and DX12 seems to be a key factor in that. I look forward to what we’ll be reporting this time next year. I think the GPU’s we see launch over the next 12 months are going to astound the masses.
Kevin Carbotte is a Content Editor for AYBonline. He knows a little about a lot, and a lot about a little. The opinions in his columns are his and his alone, but you are free to have them.
