Early adopters of Windows Vista with GeForce 8800-series graphics cards are unfortunately stuck with beta, feature-incomplete graphics drivers for the time being. However, Nvidia has tried to make it up to those users somewhat by giving them front-row seats to what, as far as we know, is the first publicly available DirectX 10 demo. Dubbed Cascades, the demo is a 168.6MB download that requires not only a GeForce 8800 graphics card and a copy of Windows Vista to run, but also Nvidia's latest ForceWare 100.64 graphics drivers.
The Cascades demo implements all kinds of graphical goodies, including procedural geometry creation (the GPU generates an endless vertical rock formation on-the-fly), dynamic particle physics (the GPU performs physics calculations for water falling down the rock formation), and displacement mapping (bumps and crevices in the rock surface occlude each other). Judging by the few screenshots on Nvidia's website, the result is quite pretty indeed. Thanks to Beyond3D for the tip.
The Cascades demo implements all kinds of graphical goodies, including procedural geometry creation (the GPU generates an endless vertical rock formation on-the-fly), dynamic particle physics (the GPU performs physics calculations for water falling down the rock formation), and displacement mapping (bumps and crevices in the rock surface occlude each other). Judging by the few screenshots on Nvidia's website, the result is quite pretty indeed. Thanks to Beyond3D for the tip.
