NVIDIA Technology Demo Timbury

Minimum System Requirements: GeForce 6800, Windows XP, ForceWare Drivers v61.76 or higher, 512 MB system memory, 128 MB video memory

Timbury Entonin Mudgett is a scientist who never lets entomology stand in the way of a good adventure. Forever searching for new and undiscovered specimens, he traverses jungles, prairies, and caves for rare insects.Timbury stands apart in his dedication to extracting insect life from the most unusual places. In addition, his field sketches are legendary. He creates them in large numbers and the artistic license he takes in preparing them is quite singular. The vast majority of his insect drawings feature species previously unknown to science, and most are smiling so as to display their large shark-like teeth. Some of his depictions feature insects wearing shoes and clothes. Sadly, none of his actual specimens have lived up to the excitement generated by his drawings.

Many of his rarest finds, unfortunately, are more properly classified as bits of leaves and twigs. It is for this reason that Timbury is more often compared to that tireless promoter of the Piltdown Man hoax, Charles Dawson, instead of the inimitable Charles Darwin. Timbury, for his part, is just happy to contribute to the world's pool of information.

This odd man gives the NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6800 GPUs an opportunity to show that they are not only vertex and pixel shading powerhouses, but that their native floating point precision allows them to handle 32-bit or 16-bit floating point data with ease.

Key Features:
1. Lighting is calculated in Industrial Light and Magic's OpenEXR 16-bit floating point math, enabling a high dynamic range not available on older graphics hardware. He is lit by the environment as opposed to artificial point lights, directional lights, or spotlights..
2. The scene is rendered into 16-bit floating point render target that allows the scene to be blurred, and is used to calculate the user's pupillary response. This causes the scene to lighten and darken based on how much light is hitting the eye. A post-processing step allows the bright areas to bloom into bright spots in the final image..
3. Timbury's facial features are refracted through his thick glasses to amplify his emotions as he inspects what he believes to be a prime specimen of the icky genus..
4. Subdivision surfaces provide a dynamic level of detail for Timbury based on the viewer's position..