A New Dawn DX11 Demo Compared to the Old Dawn @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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A New Dawn DX11 Demo Compared to the Old Dawn - It's A New Dawn! NVIDIA has brought one of our favorite demo characters back to our computer screens. Inside we will look at A New Dawn in comparison to the original 2002 Dawn in performance and image quality and see what current GPU technology allows in terms of the graphical experience.
 
Hell, we still don't see hair that isn't made of clay in most games. In some ways, Dawn from 2002 is still superior to what we get today. For me that's my biggest gripe about graphics quality, the damn hair.
 
Hair's tough to render realistically, even high budget pre-rendered CGI Hollywood films don't always do a great job of it... Brave's a great showcase, but the main character's a redhead with a huge mane of hair, and it's Pixar, so you'd hope they do as much.

Now queue the complaints about how consoles are holding graphics back in 3, 2, 1...
 
Impulse said:
Hair's tough to render realistically, even high budget pre-rendered CGI Hollywood films don't always do a great job of it... Brave's a great showcase, but the main character's a redhead with a huge mane of hair, and it's Pixar, so you'd hope they do as much.

Now queue the complaints about how consoles are holding graphics back in 3, 2, 1...
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Damn consoles holding us back.....................:D
 
Unfortunately, it'll be another decade before this graphics quality is mainstream. That's how long it'll take a thousand dollars in today's discrete graphics cards to be integrated into mainstream processors (the graphics card in ten years will be as dead as the sound card is today).

But, in 2022, we'll get to see another new Dawn demo, one that looks real, not like a cartoon.
 
Seriously [H], I'm losing faith here. You compared the environment, skin, hair, and wings ... but not the tits? Just can't count on anyone these days ... ;)
 
Just a few tidbits to add to your write up.

You can change the resolution on the original Dawn demo. There is a text config file that only has 4 lines of settings. All you have to do is right click the file and make sure "Read Only" is off. Then open it and change the line that has "1024 X 768" to "1920 X 1080". Then make the file read only again and viola!

It's in the bin directory of the demo folder and I believe the file is named App.config or something similar. (I'm at work.) I know because I've made some awesome wallpapers for my 1920X1200 monitor.

In addition, the original Dawn demo was runnable on AMD cards with a small mod. An interesting situation here was that the original Dawn demo with a wrapper mod actually ran far better on the 9700 Pro then the 5800 Ultra with better IQ.
 
matt9669 said:
Seriously [H], I'm losing faith here. You compared the environment, skin, hair, and wings ... but not the tits? Just can't count on anyone these days ... ;)
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Kyle has stated on numerous occasions that he dislikes synthetics. :D
 
Yeah but at the time the original dawn came out , that face was miles ahead of what was there.
It's like if you'd compare old dawn vs the original deus ex , you'd be like man deus ex face models look like crap.

All In all glad you guys spent all that time *cough* inspecting every inch *cough* of dawn.
 
matt9669 said:
Seriously [H], I'm losing faith here. You compared the environment, skin, hair, and wings ... but not the tits? Just can't count on anyone these days ... ;)
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Nude patches take time... I believe it was 6 months before the first dawn appeared on our screens without clothes so we could really compare the polygon counts...
 
NKDietrich said:
Hell, we still don't see hair that isn't made of clay in most games. In some ways, Dawn from 2002 is still superior to what we get today. For me that's my biggest gripe about graphics quality, the damn hair.
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What we need is a game engine that handles hair automatically. Somebody call Epic, they might be able to oblige...
 
As we play games over a decade, we sort of get used to the evolutionary improvements. It sometimes takes a moment like this, where we have to step back and look at where we've come from. I can't wait for the next decade of gaming if this tech demo is anything to go by.
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Most of the improvements of the last decade were made in 2002-2007 though. After 2007 graphics haven't changed all that much. Examples:

ES3: Morrowind (2002) -> ES4: Oblivion (2006) = Fallout 3 (2008) =~ ES5: Skyrim (2011) : No WOW-moment after Oblivion
CoD 2 (2003) -> Cod4:MW (2007) -> Cod:MW3 (2011) : Do I need to spell it out? :)
Bioshock (2007) = Bioshock 2 (2010) =~ Bioshock Infinite (2013) : No improvements
Assassins Creed (2007) = Assassins Creed Revelations (2011) : Looks basically the same

Yes, the new consoles will bring better graphics two, three years from now, no doubt about that. But then what, another 5-10 years of stagnation? Or will we be running endless timedemo's of "Dawn's Spawn Ultra" on our GTXXX980's just to see some pretty graphics? ;)
 
3dfx_zombie said:
Most of the improvements of the last decade were made in 2002-2007 though. After 2007 graphics haven't changed all that much.
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In 2008, laptop sales overtook desktop sales, which took away some of the wind behind the development of high-end graphics and CPUs.

There's little consumer demand for further improvement. The 2005 XBox 360 enjoys stronger sales than ever, because consumers aren't demanding better graphics.

The XBox 720 won't have the horsepower to run the Dawn demo as well as Hardocp ran it.
 
this is why i like to run old benchmarks every once in a while... like 3DMark2001's nature scene... that was utterly beautiful when it was first released
 
ballistic90 said:
What we need is a game engine that handles hair automatically. Somebody call Epic, they might be able to oblige...
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What we really need is a halfway decent physics implementation. A good enough real-time physics engine could calculate environmental effects on every single strand of hair, if you wished.

Of course, assuming 70,000 strands of hair, thats 70,000x the work then if you just pasted the hair on a character.

Hence where physics and rendering need to start comming together.
 
There was a nude patch floating around for the original Dawn if I remember correctly.

The Adrianne Curry demo pushed the limits of realism in skin shading.
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That chick wasn't all that cute, then she married the Brady kid and it was all down hill after that. THEN she was in the nVidia demo, I remember it was a creepy, ugly, and unflattering rendering. (The tech was cool, but the 3d model of that chick was ugly enough to make a submarine take a dirt road.)
 
Birds flying high
You know how I feel
Sun in the sky
You know how I feel
Breeze driftin' on by
You know how I feel
It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life
For me
And I'm feeling good
I'm feeling good
 
LordCalin said:
Nude patches take time... I believe it was 6 months before the first dawn appeared on our screens without clothes so we could really compare the polygon counts...
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Nope, I got a nude boob in no time. I can't recall the name of the guy that did the final nude patch but it didn't take long.
 
Am I the only one who thinks the face on the new Dawns looks half male? I actually prefer the style of the older one.
 
matt9669 said:
Seriously [H], I'm losing faith here. You compared the environment, skin, hair, and wings ... but not the tits? Just can't count on anyone these days ... ;)
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Seems the Skin Quality section ends with this comparison, going by screenshots.
 
Yeah, Dawn, Dusk, Nalu, Luna, are all separate demo's. Dusk was created with the 5900 series, after the 5800 series, they updated it a bit to show off the faster GPU, gave Dawn a more darker look. You can see that her hair is still static, and looks like straw, and the environment/background she is in is all static as well. The animations were better in this demo, than the first.

Youtube link for the demo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw2aEklugFQ
 
Cobalt35 said:
Am I the only one who thinks the face on the new Dawns looks half male? I actually prefer the style of the older one.
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I was looking through the comments to make sure I didn't post that exact same thing. The "New Dawn" looks like a sex change fairy.
 
bh192012 said:
I was looking through the comments to make sure I didn't post that exact same thing. The "New Dawn" looks like a sex change fairy.
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That's what I thought. The old one looks female. The new one looks like a "special needs" 10 year old boy. :eek:
 
Have you considered tri-SLI to see what advantages it would bring in terms of performance scaling? It's pretty interesting to see it giving a good return on investment with SLI, I remember when you were doing good to see a 25% improvement back in the early days.

It'd be interesting to see if the improvement stayed linear adding two cards or if the returns diminished.
 
graphics is just one element of a good game. You could have the best graphic technology in the world, but the game is full of bugs, crappy story line, crappy frustrating game play -- it's still a crappy game.
 
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