New Square Enix real-time DirectX 12 demo crosses the uncanny valley [Updated] |Techilink

Final fantasy creator and tech demo master Square Enix unveiled a doozie of a demo at Microsoft’s 2015 Build conference. Titled Witch Chapter 0 [cry]the demo showed a series of DirectX 12 technical and processing wizards to create a real-time animation similar to pre-rendered cutscenes and movies.

Update: We now have some delightful full-resolution screenshots of the demo, which you can check out at the end of this post.

During the demo (which you can check out below), Steve Guggenheimer of Microsoft explained that each scene contained about 63 million polygons, which is believed to be up to 12 times more than Square Enix managed to render in its Agni’s philosophy DirectX 11 demo in 2012. Running 63 million polygons with high resolution textures – in this case 8K by 8K – is no small feat. For comparison, Star burger‘s largest transports run up to about seven million polygons, while Ryse‘s protagonist Marius consisted of 85,000 polygons on the Xbox One.

One of the most impressive moments in the demo is when Guggenheimer zooms in on the character model, revealing a huge amount of detail right down to the individual pores on her skin. It was also revealed that the character’s hair was made up of individual polygons rendered using over 50 shaders and not the cheaper surface mapping technique commonly used to create features such as hair.

Alas, for those hoping that such visuals will soon find their way into a DirectX 12 game, the demo ran on an absolute monster of a machine with no less than four Nvidia GTX Titan X 12GB GPUs, along with an 8-core Intel Haswell E CPU. The cost of the GPUs alone would total more than $4,000. Square Enix is ​​earlier Agni‘s Philosophy demo ran on a GTX 680 (how much of it isn’t clear), along with an i7-3770K and 32 GB of RAM.

Seen Agni‘s Philosophy demo came out three years ago and we still haven’t seen a game reach that level of visual greatness (though Final Fantasy XV certainly coming close), and that condensing the power of four Titan X GPUs into something more affordable is still a few GPU generations away, it’s doubtful that even if developers get to grips with DirectX 12’s more efficient APIs, the average game will look like Witch Chapter 0 [cry]. Not to mention all the extra overhead that physics and gameplay systems would add to a final game. Still, it’s fun to dream, isn’t it?