That’s not to say that the GeForce 6800 GPU isn’t more than capable of rendering the kind of detail and realism portrayed in movie special effects and the like. According to Curtis Beeson, manager of the demo team at NVIDIA, the most recent generation [ES1] GPU provided quite a surprise when the demo team tried out Clear Sailing on the first available boards.

“It really is a monster. It’s got fantastic shader performance,” Beeson exclaimed. “Our last generation we called ‘The Dawn of Cinematic Shading,’ because we were introducing an architecture that would enable you to do programmable shaders, but GeForce 6800 is the one to really take that idea to the next step and deliver that feature set, but at a great performance level. In this case, we were really able to go very feature rich on the demos and create the effects we wanted.”

Demers also credited the GeForce 6800’s juice in helping the team get the results seen in the Clear Sailing demo. “The main thing we’ve been using is the raw power, the extra performance of the processor, both in terms of its general speed and also specifically in the fact that the fragment and pixel shaders are so much more powerful, especially for the 16-bit floating point stuff.”

Beeson noted that the target frame rate for the final demos is somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 frames per second (fps), though he indicated that historically—and he speaks from experience, having been involved in the making of 10-15 demos in his five years at NVIDIA—he’s found that when the demos get close to 30 fps, “people want to add more features and detail in the scenes” and are willing to “settle for 20 fps.”