Nvidia’s impressive Faceworks Tech demo now available

At the Game Developer’s Conference this year, Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off a remarkable array of tech demos illustrating what could be done with the GTX Titan, Nvidia’s flagship single-GPU card for the gaming market. Titan is a re-purposed Tesla K5000 graphics card, which was first used in the Titan super computer (and from whence it gets its name).

The tech demo only consists of the facial expressions of a man’s head and is called FaceWorks. The demo shown at GDC required the Titan to run it in all its glory, but the principles of the demo can be added into games in the near future and won’t require a R15,000 behemoth.

The demo only runs on Windows and requires a Geforce graphics card with CUDA capability. That’s right, AMD fans – you have TressFX, Nvidia has this head.

The demo uses CUDA to harness the power of all the shader cores to draw emotions on the face. Nvidia says that it’s one of the most difficult things they’ve ever had to do and that matching the different facial structures to show emotion is tricky. The facial animations that were done at GDC were amazing and they’re going to make games a lot more interesting.

What kind of hardware would you need for FaceWorks tech in a future game? Well, probably a GTX670 to start off with. Nvidia claims that you need around 2 teraflops of theoretical throughput to do it in real-time and if they don’t limit it to Geforce cards only, you’ll be able to do it on an AMD HD7950 as well. That’s quite doable.

However, this might be a CUDA-only innovation considering that Nvidia doesn’t support OpenCL projects to accelerate applications using video cards. If true, AMD will have to come up with something similar in the future in addition to TressFX, which runs on any card using OpenCL.