Nvidia Shows Impressive GameWorks Flow Tech

tommybhoy · 20 Apr 2017 at 22:30

Nvidia Shows Impressive GameWorks Flow Tech

Today Nvidia released a video demonstrating its 'Flow' technology, joining the GameWorks suite to simulate combustible fluid, fire and smoke. You can check out the video below, running in DirectX 12, even if the tech works in DirectX 11 as well.

http://www.ggmania.com/?smsid=nvidia-shows-impressive-gameworks-flow-tech-43173#.WPkmttIrKUk

NVIDIA Flow is a realtime fluid simulation - in this demo, simulating fire and smoke. The simulation is based on an adaptive sparse voxel grid, allowing the simulation to focus compute and memory resources around regions of interest, and track shifts in the region of interest over time.

With the fire, the combustion process is simulated per voxel, generating elevated temperatures and smoke, which influences the visual appearance and produces buoyancy and expansion effects on the fluid simulation.

An adaptive sparse voxel grid is also used to compute self-shadowing on the smoke, increasing both the realism and visualizing the structure of the smoke. The fluid simulation supports real time collision with objects in the environment, along with fuel emitters than can be modified in real time, making the simulation fully interactive.

For more information on the Flow library:
https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-flow

Would love to see some of this in games.

r7slayer · 20 Apr 2017 at 22:35

Love the tech but hate the performance hit.

TheRealDeal · 20 Apr 2017 at 22:39

Looks really good. Hopefully the performance hit would not be too great but smoke, fire and explosions always seem to tank performance.

Rroff · 20 Apr 2017 at 22:39

Can't wait till games use stuff like this for water - nothing worse than a great looking scene then you notice the billboard sprites use for a waterfall, etc.

Mayh3M · 20 Apr 2017 at 22:54

Nvidia continuing to innovate.

arc@css · 20 Apr 2017 at 22:59

I thought it looked good, but I was more in awe of the pipes and general background.

r7slayer · 21 Apr 2017 at 00:32

Mayh3M said:
Nvidia continuing to innovate.

Tbf you see this sorta stuff all the time. Especially when you see new engines being shown off but the hot
Horsepower needed is usually ridiculous. Its only a real innovation when its delevoped where devs can make use of it and dosnt cause a massive performance hit. As generally speaking a lot have mid ranged systems and it can make fps tank which kinda ruins things. So as long as this dosnt take a massive hit on performance then lll consider it innovation.
I used to turn godrays off in fallout for example because the performance hit was not worth the little iq it added.

Gregster · 21 Apr 2017 at 07:06

I love these effects and hopefully we get to see them in games.

Perfect_Chaos · 21 Apr 2017 at 07:44

I'd much prefer this done in engine, like Source games with Havok. I even turned all the gameworks stuff off in Killing Floor 2 because of the poor performance.

Cooper · 21 Apr 2017 at 08:32

TheRealDeal said:
smoke, fire and explosions always seem to tank performance

Alpha effects have always been the biggest bandwidth sapping, frame rate killing effects in games.

JediFragger · 21 Apr 2017 at 08:35

Cooper said:
Alpha effects have always been the biggest bandwidth sapping, frame rate killing effects in games.

Yup, in the Division when there's a Contam Event and loooooooots of fire and explosions going on my fps still tank! Usually a solid 75 running 3840x1600@Ultra though so I can't complain too much.... :cool:

And it looks fantastic too

Seanspeed · 21 Apr 2017 at 09:52

Voxel-based effects are incredibly costly. But super cool.

Should Moore's Law not completely stall out in the near future, I think voxel-based graphics will become very popular for pushing advanced visuals with complex physics.

opethdisciple · 21 Apr 2017 at 13:51

Are AMD able to do Voxel or is this Nvidia only?

Rroff · 21 Apr 2017 at 13:54

opethdisciple said:
Are AMD able to do Voxel or is this Nvidia only?

Nothing stopping anyone using sparse voxel octrees in their game - though when used for a rendering effect fully optimised on a hardware vendor basis I believe nVidia has some acceleration available at hardware level that helps (its likely the changes in Vega will include similar).

AMD's typically wide architecture kind of naturally works well with that kind of stuff but I don't believe they've paid any attention to that type of use specifically.

opethdisciple · 21 Apr 2017 at 14:14

So really Nvidia putting the word GameWorks next to it is a bit misleading then?

Rroff · 21 Apr 2017 at 14:15

Well there is a big step from the basic mechanics through to actually using it for something like in this case fire rendering.

D.P. · 21 Apr 2017 at 16:07

opethdisciple said:
So really Nvidia putting the word GameWorks next to it is a bit misleading then?

What do you mean? Gamesworks is just a collection of graphical effects that developers can incorporate freeing up resources. Most games works effects have always run on AMD hardware

opethdisciple · 21 Apr 2017 at 16:20

D.P. said:
What do you mean? Gamesworks is just a collection of graphical effects that developers can incorporate freeing up resources. Most games works effects have always run on AMD hardware

Ignore me. I was getting two things mixed up. I asked a question about Voxel and then replied talking about Gameworks in context of this fire demo.

I'm tired, it's a Fri. I need sleep.

nashathedog · 21 Apr 2017 at 16:21

snipety snip

D.P. · 21 Apr 2017 at 16:30

opethdisciple said:
Ignore me. I was getting two things mixed up. I asked a question about Voxel and then replied talking about Gameworks in context of this fire demo.

I'm tired, it's a Fri. I need sleep.

Time for a beer.