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A new tech demo of a crying woman – powered by upcoming API DirectX 12 – has left techies and PC gamers with their jaws on the floor.
The demo, titled ‘WITCH CHAPTER 0 [cry]’, was produced by games publisher-developer Square Enix and shown off at the Microsoft Build conference.
It was running off a machine with four Nvidia Titan X graphics cards and was using DirectX 12, which is due to launch alongside Windows 10 later this year.
The spokesperson on stage said that this API can produce 63 million polygons per scene – around six to 12 times more than DirectX 11. He also added that it allows developers to produce more accurate lighting, hair, tears and more.
Nvidia says the demo may come to represent a new milestone in an industry which has previously struggled to cross the ‘uncanny valley’ (a term used to describe the boundary where emotional realism in the digital world begins to blur with reality – and creates a sense of the strange, or even revulsion, in human observers).
The demo attempts to – and we would say succeeds in – portraying human crying with a real-time computer-generated character. Check it out for yourself below (it starts at around one minute in):
Further reading: DirectX 12 versus DirectX11 – early tests show big performance gains
In other PC gaming industry news, this year’s E3 games trade show in LA will feature its own PC Gaming Show on June 16th, hosted by AMD and PC Gamer. It will have speakers including Dean Hall and Cliff Bleszinski as well as representatives from companies including Blizzard, Cloud Imperium, Devolver, Paradox and Square Enix. Read more about this on MCV.
