NVIDIA Demo: Cascades for Windows

Explore a fantastic world of endless rock formations and exhilirating detail. Watch majestic waterfalls cascade down exotic rock formations, while buzzing swarms of dragonfly-like inhabitants dive and play.

Sit back and watch as the water flows down over a cliff, sails through the air, and crashes back onto the rock below in a cloud of mist. Or, bring out your inner artist and interactively design your own waterfalls, creating a beautiful dreamscape for others to explore.

Features:

Microsoft DirectX 10

Every aspect of the Cascades demo demonstrates next-generation features enabled by DirectX 10, including the generation of terrain on the GPU, smart particle systems, and the high quality rendering of the scene.

Procedural Geometry Creation

Rock structures are built by the GPU itself. Use the middle mouse button to pan endlessly up or down, while the GPU streams out new chunks of rock in an infinite variety of shapes and formations.

Smart Particles

The waterfalls (and insect flocking) are driven by advanced particle systems with geometry shaders at their core. Realistic physics let water particles collide with the rock and flow over it naturally. Particles can even spawn other particles - for example, a water particle can spawn a mist particle when it collides with the rock at high speed.

Hyper-Realistic Shading

Even after driving all of the new effects in this demo, the GPU still has plenty of horsepower left for unbelievable shading quality, and even Displacement Mapping. From the farthest vantage to the closest scrutiny of the surface, textures appear rich and palpable.