Nvidia gamers venture into "100,000 hairs" territory

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While new GPU platforms and game engines might be beyond the hip pocket of a lot of gamers - or merely theoretical until supported games arrive - they're still an interesting look at technology that will filter down to the masses.

Case in point: this Nvidia video below for the new GTX 680. Demoing features like GPU Boost, anti-aliasing techniques and dynamic destruction, it shows what the Nvidia camp will have at their disposal when the card arrives [UPDATE: The GTX 680 has now been officially announced].

So what of the video?

The underlying technology behind this card has already generated some buzz, thanks to its use in a recent graphics demonstration of Epic's Samaritan benchmark. The key marketing push by Nvidia is the Kepler GPU platform's ability to employ techniques that save on GPU memory for the usually memory-hogging anti-aliasing.

If there's anyway of summing this up, it's a story that echoes Intel efforts of being smarter in squeezing more out of the circuitry. Boiling all this down to "better hairs" is a simplistic way of looking at things, but at least we’ve moved beyond raw frames territory.

As we've discussed before, there was a time when the focus by the industry on consoles meant that PC gamers to some extent missed out on the full potential of this hardware. But with new gaming engines on the way, like the Unreal engine behind the aforementioned Samaritan demo, there are things to get excited about. Watch the Samaritan video here.

No doubt this card will be beyond the reach of many gamers (some of us have budgets), but if you're on a three or even four year old card right now, this year presents some enticing upgrade options.

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