Friday night’s big GTX 1080 unveil
was the talk of the tech community, but it’s not the only project that
Nvidia unveiled this past weekend. The company also showcased a pair of
software projects it’s working on to showcase both its efforts in VR and
its ability to beautify game screenshots.
Nvidia’s Ansel (named after Ansel Adams, the
famous American environmentalist and photographer) is a new tool
designed to allow users to create screenshots and even 360-degree
“bubble” images. The ability to take screenshots in games is nothing
new, of course, but Ansel allows you to step “outside” your character
and manipulate the camera position before settling on a shot.
One of the frustrating things about trying to
create “perfect” screenshots in gaming is that how easy it is to do so
largely depends on whether the camera is a flexible, powerful, and
intuitive tool or something kludged together by three chimpanzees and a
rat after six years of perpetual crunch time. Ansel aims to reduce this
type of problem by giving gamers powerful tools to pose and create
screenshots — provided that developers support the feature, at least.
Ansel allows you to freeze time inside a game
and adjust the camera position to anything you like — even in games that
don’t allow a completely free camera already. It then scales up the
resolution of the final screenshot to as high as 32x native resolution
(4.5 gigapixels). These truly enormous image files — because seriously,
that’s going to be one hell of a file size — can then be downsampled for an incredibly high-resolution focus on one specific area.
Other features include the ability to apply
specific filters (Instagram for games, we suppose), capture and export
in OpenEXR, and the option to capture 360-degree “bubbles” for viewing
in VR. Nvidia announced at the same event that it has released an Nvidia
VR Viewer for the Google Cardboard app (sadly only Android is supported
as of this writing). You’ll be able to adjust the yaw, pitch, and roll
of the camera, change the brightness or color, and create 360-degree
shots (a gallery of these is available on Nvidia’s website). It’ll be
supported on all Nvidia GPUs from the 600 family forwards, which means
Kepler and Maxwell users will still have access to this tool.
The only downside is that support will be
baked in on a game-by-game level, not implemented across the board at
this point. Whether Nvidia will be able to convince game devs to
standardize on a set of capabilities that enable Ansel in the future or
not is unclear. But since support will ship in some games that have
already been out for quite some time, it’s clearly something that can be
patched in rather than required from Day 1.
The other major Nvidia announcement on the
software front was its new VR Funhouse. This is a clever way for Nvidia
to highlight the advances of both its VRWorks SDK and its overall
technology — the various mini-games in VR Funhouse showcase technologies
like Nvidia Hairworks, particle effects, Nvidia Flow (used for
simulating fire and water) and PhysX.
Nvidia Flex (partical-based physics
simulation) and the company’s physically simulated audio engine (Nvidia
VRWorks Audio) are also used in Funhouse, which is best understood as a
tech demo to showcase cutting-edge capabilities in a series of
mini-games. It should also serve as a fun introduction to VR technology
for early adopters and users who want to show visitors an easy, simple
series of mini-games with low stakes and friendly controls.
We didn’t have the opportunity to demo much of
Nvidia’s VR work this weekend, but the Nvidia audio demo we attended
was quite good — the ability to simulate position based on where we were
in the virtual space was impressive. Whether or not this capability
will find much uptake in the real world, however, is less clear —
multiple companies throughout the years have tried to convince game devs
to implement impressive audio capabilities (most recently AMD, with its
TrueAudio DSP) and the vast majority of developers seemingly can’t be
arsed to bother.
Nvidia will also use VR Funhouse to support
its VRWorks SLI capabilities. While most VR games and apps to-date are
single-GPU affairs, both AMD and Nvidia are working hard to change that.
Nvidia will support VR SLI with VR Funhouse, dedicating one GPU to
rendering each eye. Unlike Nvidia Ansel, VR Funworks appears to be a
Pascal-only title.
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