That's called backwards compatibility if your a developer or creative solutions engineer you never throw away a #devkit it's one of video games most useful and valuable access because it's what's used to create a video game using the ugliest computer looking thing raw specs there so hard to come by it's like James bond ESK ADVENTURE trying to find the cosmic cube major ones to look for #snes #atari2600 #xbox #ps1 #ps2 #ps3 #ps4 #ps5 #n64 #segasaturn #segadreamcast #segasmasterssystem #neogeo #segagenesis #sega32x #64dd #xbox360 #xbox1 #xboxSx #pcengine #turbograpx16 #towns #msx #sonymsx #philipsmsx #dell #appleii(2) #commodore #commodore2 #commodore64 #nintendogamecube #nintendowii #nintendowiiu basically there thousands of others and some more legacy than most depending on a mental state of mind basically now with that said #leveno #acer #nvidia #havoc #unreal they need to build a total of there own Pc gaming devices soon #capcom #konami and #electronicarts before and after madden #tecmo #square-enix #namcobandai #warnersbros #universalpictures are #paramount has some hidden tech in there Hills behind the city of los Angeles CA edition #disney youre are a southern California resident then come on down and enjoy the #knottsberryfarm and #sixflagsmagicmountian #gameworks Arcade cabinet playing & food restaurant and grill
Bought an amd 5700xt and will never buy another amd GPU after the issues that gpu gave my computer. Got a 4070ti super now and super happy never any crashes or driver issues. Thanks nvidia not just for being better performance than amd but being reliable and easy to use.
@@NotoriousFC Yeah AMD got problems with their 5000 drivers but it's not the case anymore with their new cards. They shifted a lot more towards software like NVIDIA.
It may look the same, but it is different actually. The "Shiny" demo maps an environment texture (cube map texture) to simulate reflections. The environment map is pre-rendered, which means it can't display actual objects in the game in real time (for example, if you add a sphere object next to it, it will not be reflected), as it is just a pre-rendered texture. Currently, regular games use screen space reflections (based on ray marching). While the latest generation of games (like Cyberpunk 2077 version 1.6+) achieves this with ray tracing and path tracing, which are real-time and capable of multiple ray bounces.
It's incredible when you consider just how many of these techniques and concepts, once only possible in tech demos, are now used in almost every major game without the player even thinking about it. Computer graphics have come so far in the past 25 years...
7:17 and still, almost 20 years later, we don't have games with such detailed smoke or water physics. Today, it's all "ray tracing this", "ray tracing that". I wish there was a focus on physics simulation. Good memories. I remember downloading the stuff from 2006. Blew my mind that I could actually control the demo in real time.
@@shmookins agreed, it’s like when half life 2 came out. I feel like that represented a massive jump that affected not only graphics but gameplay and it was all because of the Source physic’s engine. Like, ray tracing is pretty, but i don’t know if it can be the game’s mechanic. Incredible physics can inform the gameplay mechanics, like the gravity gun in half life 2.
We have great physics simulations, look at control. Most developers just can't bother to implement them. GTA 4 had realistic driving and human behaviour and it is 16 years old, RDR2 also had that along with realistic npc AI .
I definitely remember in Stalker Clear Sky there is a moment where volumetric smoke is used, or rather steam comes from the ventilation and if a box is placed in front of it, the smoke will spread around the box and not through it, and I haven’t seen this in any other games.
True, I think there's still games with cool physics, The Finals probably has it. But older games like GTA 4 and Half Life were AAA games with really awesome physics.
@@RicardoMontania Raytracing has been around since the early 1980s, but there's a difference between frames per second (real time) and hours per frame (pre-rendered movies). Monsters, Inc took 29 CPU hours to generate a single frame so they had to use a massive "render farm" with over 1000 servers! Also, be careful of confusing "rendering" with "raytracing". Monsters, Inc used "RenderMan" which has sophisticated algorithms to shortcut the slowness of ray tracing. I have no idea if nVidia's claims of "ray tracing" are genuine or just a marketing term for a RenderMan-like ability, but it still seems impressive to reach 3fps.
@@АлександрСмирнов-с7д2ж If you used raytracing in the 2000s, then you know how glacially slow it was to render. For complex scenes with lots of reflections and refractions, people would leave their computers running overnight. Which makes the fact that nVidia was selling a graphics card as doing "raytracing" in 2010 all the more incredible. I wonder what the heck it actually did. Genuine ray tracing would still have been too slow for realtime animation, so maybe they meant the card merely accelerated the calculations for baking in (precalculating) the lighting and shadows. Or maybe it was meant for generating pre-rendered cut-scenes?
@@pacomatic9833 but they're boring AND not impressive. Most modern games are doing everything but trying to be fun, because devs are just trying to make some money instead of trying to make a good and fun game
@@tryarie1970 how is that even comparable? It's not a game trailer, they show exactly how this technology works, and it would work exactly the same way or even better if it was implemented into the game. Some of these technologies are default at this point, but still, some modern games don't even have something that's considered default by today's standards...
It really shows how gaming consoles have stymied innovation and progress in graphical development. When the original Xbox hit the scene, it marked the beginning of the end of creative growth and innovation in games. Every PC game got shoe-horned onto these gated garden consoles and destroyed the industry’s unlimited growth potential. I think we’re seeing the final effects of that happening to the industry now.
@@Resvrgam It has nothing to do with anything you said. The reason is that the GPUs weren't powerful enough to do all of these things in a real-time gaming experience. These were small tech demos with either limited functionality or were just animations. Of course, it's much easier to render an animation or small scene than a full game like Call of Duty or Resident Evil.
@@nothughmahn Consoles need to be cheap enough for mass consumption. That means corners need to be cut. It also means the hardware is static. This has contributed to the stagnation of graphical advancements because it was more profitable to keep things held back for cheaper, static hardware than making new and innovative graphic advancements for PC graphics cards now.
@@2fernandoc1 No, it didn't. At all. It wasn't capable of anything, it couldn't even display proper textures most of the time, there's a reason why developers had to constantly go back to gouraud shading for everything.
because the old ones were fascinating for the time and were showing what could come in the future while nowdays all thos demos are already achivable in games so to us they dont look anything special
We’re just very used to how advanced graphics has gotten, to the point where newer technologies just don’t give that spark it used to as it was something we had never seen before. UE5 and such is still highly impressive, so credit is due.
Becuse we hadn't had any actual technological advacenements in aobut 15+ years. It's all just raytracing this, ai graphics that but we're stuck in a limbo. I pity all kids who didn't experience 1990-2005 and the insane leaps graphical development did in that timeframe. You went from 16 Color EGA to 3DFX to actual photorealistic graphics. In the past 15 years people couldn't even make water look realistic.
We’re at a point where the biggest bottleneck for creating amazing graphics is from creating the art assets itself, not the rendering tech. A tech demo made by a small internal team is going to have a harder time impressing then an environment created by a AAA studio with hundreds of accomplished artists and a hundred million dollar budget, even if the tech demo is using more advanced rendering tech. Plus, devs have gotten extremely good getting the most out of “old school” rendering techniques that newer types of rendering tech don’t hit quite as hard as they might have - ray tracing and path tracing looks amazing, but the older baked lighting systems games used a generation earlier still hold up really well. The most impressive tech demos coming out these days are ones from Epic Games in my opinion, but that’s because they have the combined power of impressive tech, a hugely popular engine to sell that tech to, and a massive army of artists to enlist to showcase their engine’s latest features in the best possible light.
I am really surprised at how big of a jump the early 1990s vs early 2000s were - while these days, people would play a 10 year old game and praise the graphics.
For a long time, PC graphics were leaps and bounds ahead of what was available on consoles. I used to love downloading the latest nvidia tech demos just to see if my computer could run them. I remember the wolfman demo running at like 5fps lol. I found it fascinating to look at the advancements in reflection and water graphics. The 1999-2000 demos bring back some fond memories. It was fun time to be a kid and into computers.
@@Henrybramthis is just my feeling, I have no idea if it’s factually accurate, but it seems like today most PC games can still be tuned down to work on consoles. It’s essentially just effects like ray tracing that make them look more impressive, they aren’t using dramatically larger worlds or complex models or anything. Back in the day, it seemed as though there were many games that would be impossible to run on the consoles of the time no matter how you optimized them. I’m talking during the PlayStation era. But it may have just been a difference in development software and proprietary hardware of consoles. Maybe now it’s all a lot more universal.
@@okitasan I aggree but the thing is for consoles back then we're usually graphically more powerful than pcs unless u get the best of the best pc the. The pc is much better, but also graphically the old nvidia GPUs were so impressive for the time
Diminishing returns. As graphics get better, it takes exponentially more effort to make things look a little more realistic. I guarantee it won't be long until even mobile games barely look worse than PC games
The PS1, PS2 and PS3 tech demos looked way more impressive. Some games like Crash Bandicoot or Rascal could also pass as tech demos in their own right. Also comparing tech demos is not a good way to see the power of a hardware because its non applicable in real time game scenarios.
Nvidia has removed Dusk, Dawn, Nalu, Luna, Adrianne, Medusa and A New Dawn from their website along with any mention that these demos ever existed, because they have sexy women in them. Not politically appropriate anymore.
You missed one. The Geforce 3 had a demo that rendered, in real time, a scene from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I can forgive you missing it since it was never publicly released for download. Most people don't even know about it. It was super impressive for it's time.
Cool video! Thanks for showing some of those NVIDIA logos too! I think some demos are missing from this video. I remember one that showcased subsurface scattering, and there was one called Samaritan that comes to mind too
I didn't know about a lot of these. Every time I get a new graphics cards I have always enjoyed going back and trying older tech demos that used to make my system struggle and watching my system plow through them with ease. For example, I remember trying Unigine Heaven on my GTX 460 back in the day and it would really struggle with any of the medium/higher settings. Then my GTX 970 did fairly well on it but still wasn't flawless at Ultra. I wasn't until my GTX 1080 that it was able to blast through it on Ultra settings at 1080p, and it was very satisfying when it finally did. Cheers!
Pond was clearly about manipulating vertices in the GPU. I love this stuff. I wish I could go back and start learning it and get into the industry when it was fresh.
Holy fuck I got a nostalgia hit from that 2:50 monster with a minigun. I am not even sure from where, but I remember as a kid playing a game which had that as a starting logo.
To this day I'm still waiting for nVidia to release the Racer RTX demo to the public like they promised two years ago. At this point I'm confident that it's never going to come out.
Its seems, you only took the demos Nvidia currently lists, but sadly, they missed a few. E.g. Nalu Demo from 2004, which was mermaid with very beautiful long hair. She is actually hidden on the Geforce 6 card even in this video in the top left corner. Actually someone found out that Nvidia removed all demos with female characters, quite some iconic, but too sexy now? They are Dusk, Dawn, Nalu, Luna, Adrianne, Medusa and A New Dawn
i remember dawn had a glitch were if you renamed the executable to 3dmark.exe, all of her clothes disappeared, and she was fully modeled below. that caused quite a stir at the time. they even re-released the demo without the glitch
One of the things i love watching as time goes by, is theres always 1 studio that gets something really impressive to work thats singular about their game, then 10 years down the road when everybody else gets that same feature in their games and its properly appreciated just how difficult it is to get it to work, and you wonder how the hell someone figured it out with previous generation shit.
Blows me away that things 10-20 years ago look better than characters made today from AAA developers. The last decade some developers have made barely any effort
I had just graduated high school and was building my own PC’s in the early 2000’s and I remember how you couldn’t keep up with the video card changes. A game that came out like a year after your video card already wouldn’t run on it. And I don’t mean would run poorly. I mean you couldn’t even start it up.
@@myballsishurtinggaming it depended on the game, but happened quite often. New features were being launched on new cards all the time. Cards didn't even have pixel shaders until 2001.
7:24 is there like a single game that used this type of smoke simulation? This looks advanced for 2024 but it’s from 2006??? I’ve literally never seen it before!
12:44 The saddest thing is seeing the amazing lighting and then the most horrendeous ghosting for reflections... As a kid I used to see a lot of demos both made by companies like nvidia or rad game tools and those made by randoms in the demoscene. Reflections used to be an artistic theme to such an extent back then, to the point it was the defining aesthetic factor of a good few graphical generations. Why the hell did it also seem acceptable to start reducing the resolution for reflections? Especially once we stopped having to use tricks such as doubling the environment and mimicking a player's moves just so a bathroom mirror could seem realistic. Not fully using a GPU's power for high resolution reflections seems the laziest thing possible in the name of "optimization". Reflections are literally the most important thing since many objects make use of it! In a whole scene, seeing large pixelated and blurry reflections for all the objects you pass by and immense ghosting trails because the road is wet therefore it has reflections... is simply unacceptable in 2024.
*UNIGINE* is not an NVidia demo. It is a Russian graphic engine, mostly used in industrial and military applications. They did the demo that was useful for benchmarking, though.
Changing my Riva TNT2 16MB for a GeForce DDR 32MB in 2001 was by far the biggest improvement I've ever experienced in the realtime 3D world .. everything went from unplayable to super smooth, with all the 3D features turned on .. and no crashes, no bugs, never .. the GeForce SDR was already a good card, but a bit slow because of its memory .. the GeForce DDR fixed that, with pretty much the performance of the very expensive, highend GeForce 2 GTS .. but way cheaper .. so it was such a milestone, game changing card for me back in those days ..
Any reason you skipped the Fairy and the Mermaid tech demos? Those were graphically impressive for their time and stood out as company mascots in advertising.
![[TH] 2024 PMGC League | Survival Stage วันที่ 1 | PUBG MOBILE Global Championship](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FVFT-PFwU80/mqdefault.jpg)
What is your favorite tech demo?! Comment below!
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Mad mod mike😂
For me, Chameleon
I think A New Dawn, because it is one of the few nVidia demo's that renders a detailed environment together with a highly detailed character.
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@@GameEvolutions Alien demo, very particular lol
The ones from 1999 are insane for the time. Brilliant video
Indeed it is near a ps3 graphics I really can’t believe it.
@@a.s.l711 You have to see the PS2 old man tech demo. That was near photorealistic.
That's called backwards compatibility if your a developer or creative solutions engineer you never throw away a #devkit it's one of video games most useful and valuable access because it's what's used to create a video game using the ugliest computer looking thing raw specs there so hard to come by it's like James bond ESK ADVENTURE trying to find the cosmic cube major ones to look for #snes #atari2600 #xbox #ps1 #ps2 #ps3 #ps4 #ps5 #n64 #segasaturn #segadreamcast #segasmasterssystem #neogeo #segagenesis #sega32x #64dd #xbox360 #xbox1 #xboxSx #pcengine #turbograpx16 #towns #msx #sonymsx #philipsmsx #dell #appleii(2) #commodore #commodore2 #commodore64 #nintendogamecube #nintendowii #nintendowiiu basically there thousands of others and some more legacy than most depending on a mental state of mind basically now with that said #leveno #acer #nvidia #havoc #unreal they need to build a total of there own Pc gaming devices soon #capcom #konami and #electronicarts before and after madden #tecmo #square-enix #namcobandai #warnersbros #universalpictures are #paramount has some hidden tech in there Hills behind the city of los Angeles CA edition #disney youre are a southern California resident then come on down and enjoy the #knottsberryfarm and #sixflagsmagicmountian #gameworks Arcade cabinet playing & food restaurant and grill
@@a.s.l711I still watch this video once a month. Generally cannot get over how good they look
I agree. Grass demo is wonderful.
11:07 Lore accurate NVIDIA customer
Fr
😆
The more you buy, the more you save!
Bought an amd 5700xt and will never buy another amd GPU after the issues that gpu gave my computer. Got a 4070ti super now and super happy never any crashes or driver issues. Thanks nvidia not just for being better performance than amd but being reliable and easy to use.
@@NotoriousFC Yeah AMD got problems with their 5000 drivers but it's not the case anymore with their new cards. They shifted a lot more towards software like NVIDIA.
Its surprising how the 2001 "shiny" graphics almost looks the same to certain current softwares.
Which ones?
It may look the same, but it is different actually. The "Shiny" demo maps an environment texture (cube map texture) to simulate reflections. The environment map is pre-rendered, which means it can't display actual objects in the game in real time (for example, if you add a sphere object next to it, it will not be reflected), as it is just a pre-rendered texture. Currently, regular games use screen space reflections (based on ray marching). While the latest generation of games (like Cyberpunk 2077 version 1.6+) achieves this with ray tracing and path tracing, which are real-time and capable of multiple ray bounces.
@@tadpoleisalive gollum
@@AlejandroRamos-gx8xh HUH?
@@tadpoleisaliveit doesnt
It's incredible when you consider just how many of these techniques and concepts, once only possible in tech demos, are now used in almost every major game without the player even thinking about it. Computer graphics have come so far in the past 25 years...
i remember when FXAA was quite heavy
name one game that uses real time interactive smoke simulation
@@ιλι what's that got to do with the original comment?
@@NonsensicalSpudz read the comment again and look at 7:17
@@ιλιmaybe cs go 2
6:00 - Geez. The era of extreme bloom really blighted those mid-to-late 00s games.
Oblivion spirit
Welcome to the dreamscape
@@muffinconsumer4431wha
7:17 and still, almost 20 years later, we don't have games with such detailed smoke or water physics. Today, it's all "ray tracing this", "ray tracing that". I wish there was a focus on physics simulation.
Good memories. I remember downloading the stuff from 2006. Blew my mind that I could actually control the demo in real time.
@@shmookins agreed, it’s like when half life 2 came out. I feel like that represented a massive jump that affected not only graphics but gameplay and it was all because of the Source physic’s engine. Like, ray tracing is pretty, but i don’t know if it can be the game’s mechanic. Incredible physics can inform the gameplay mechanics, like the gravity gun in half life 2.
these are all tech demos it would probably have bad performance in a big game
We have great physics simulations, look at control. Most developers just can't bother to implement them. GTA 4 had realistic driving and human behaviour and it is 16 years old, RDR2 also had that along with realistic npc AI .
I definitely remember in Stalker Clear Sky there is a moment where volumetric smoke is used, or rather steam comes from the ventilation and if a box is placed in front of it, the smoke will spread around the box and not through it, and I haven’t seen this in any other games.
True, I think there's still games with cool physics, The Finals probably has it. But older games like GTA 4 and Half Life were AAA games with really awesome physics.
man I miss seeing those old nvidia logo animations, oozing with creativity
back then, nvidia was a company that wanted to create 3d cards for gaming.
today their focus is elsewere and gaming a second thought.
@@nydaarius6845A new competitor will inevitably emerge.
With that voice, gives me nolstagia because of playing Battlefield 2
That whisper instantly brings to mind the Batman: Arkham series. I can hear the menu music start to play immediately afterwards
2000: you need GeForce 2 to see reflections
2024: you need GeForce 4090 to see reflections.
Mfw technology advances
You need GeForce Series X/S to see reflections.
my thoughts exactly 🎯
We need your moneyyyy
Were not rendering 720 pixels anymore
Hearing “Ray Tracing” in 2010 is incredible
yea but it also ran at like 3fps
Brother ray tracing tech was used in the Monsters Inc movie (2001)
@@RicardoMontania Raytracing has been around since the early 1980s, but there's a difference between frames per second (real time) and hours per frame (pre-rendered movies). Monsters, Inc took 29 CPU hours to generate a single frame so they had to use a massive "render farm" with over 1000 servers!
Also, be careful of confusing "rendering" with "raytracing". Monsters, Inc used "RenderMan" which has sophisticated algorithms to shortcut the slowness of ray tracing. I have no idea if nVidia's claims of "ray tracing" are genuine or just a marketing term for a RenderMan-like ability, but it still seems impressive to reach 3fps.
I learned about ray tracing in 3dsmax in the 2000s while still in school
@@АлександрСмирнов-с7д2ж If you used raytracing in the 2000s, then you know how glacially slow it was to render. For complex scenes with lots of reflections and refractions, people would leave their computers running overnight. Which makes the fact that nVidia was selling a graphics card as doing "raytracing" in 2010 all the more incredible. I wonder what the heck it actually did. Genuine ray tracing would still have been too slow for realtime animation, so maybe they meant the card merely accelerated the calculations for baking in (precalculating) the lighting and shadows. Or maybe it was meant for generating pre-rendered cut-scenes?
For their time "bubble" "grass" and "smapl pond" look amazing, they actually look revolutionary
these tech demos are more impressive than most modern games
Modern games are (or should at least) be more focused on fun than being impressive.
That's like saying the products on the ads look better that the actual one, which is duh.
@@pacomatic9833the issue is that they’re not impressive either. they’re usually just bad, nowadays.
@@pacomatic9833 but they're boring AND not impressive. Most modern games are doing everything but trying to be fun, because devs are just trying to make some money instead of trying to make a good and fun game
@@tryarie1970 how is that even comparable? It's not a game trailer, they show exactly how this technology works, and it would work exactly the same way or even better if it was implemented into the game. Some of these technologies are default at this point, but still, some modern games don't even have something that's considered default by today's standards...
You know, for how old these tech demos are, I'd almost think they'd be made for modern day graphics standards.
Same looking at some of the 2010s ones and thinking that looks like a game that’d come out today
It really shows how gaming consoles have stymied innovation and progress in graphical development. When the original Xbox hit the scene, it marked the beginning of the end of creative growth and innovation in games. Every PC game got shoe-horned onto these gated garden consoles and destroyed the industry’s unlimited growth potential. I think we’re seeing the final effects of that happening to the industry now.
@@Resvrgam It has nothing to do with anything you said. The reason is that the GPUs weren't powerful enough to do all of these things in a real-time gaming experience. These were small tech demos with either limited functionality or were just animations. Of course, it's much easier to render an animation or small scene than a full game like Call of Duty or Resident Evil.
@@nothughmahn Consoles need to be cheap enough for mass consumption. That means corners need to be cut. It also means the hardware is static. This has contributed to the stagnation of graphical advancements because it was more profitable to keep things held back for cheaper, static hardware than making new and innovative graphic advancements for PC graphics cards now.
@@ResvrgamNah, ur just ascribing blame where there is none
7:30 that is crazy for 2006!
To be fair, Mario 64 did something like this 10 years earlier on the N64
@@2fernandoc1 No, it didn't. At all. It wasn't capable of anything, it couldn't even display proper textures most of the time, there's a reason why developers had to constantly go back to gouraud shading for everything.
@@JamesKim-m7f Mario's head didn't have nearly half the amount of polygons that frog has
Not really. Crysis was released in 2007
You know you are getting old when you've watched all of this unfold in real time LOL!!!
Why am I still more impressed with the early 2000's tech vids rather than the newest?
because the old ones were fascinating for the time and were showing what could come in the future while nowdays all thos demos are already achivable in games so to us they dont look anything special
We’re just very used to how advanced graphics has gotten, to the point where newer technologies just don’t give that spark it used to as it was something we had never seen before. UE5 and such is still highly impressive, so credit is due.
The pond one looked amazing.
Becuse we hadn't had any actual technological advacenements in aobut 15+ years. It's all just raytracing this, ai graphics that but we're stuck in a limbo. I pity all kids who didn't experience 1990-2005 and the insane leaps graphical development did in that timeframe. You went from 16 Color EGA to 3DFX to actual photorealistic graphics. In the past 15 years people couldn't even make water look realistic.
We’re at a point where the biggest bottleneck for creating amazing graphics is from creating the art assets itself, not the rendering tech. A tech demo made by a small internal team is going to have a harder time impressing then an environment created by a AAA studio with hundreds of accomplished artists and a hundred million dollar budget, even if the tech demo is using more advanced rendering tech. Plus, devs have gotten extremely good getting the most out of “old school” rendering techniques that newer types of rendering tech don’t hit quite as hard as they might have - ray tracing and path tracing looks amazing, but the older baked lighting systems games used a generation earlier still hold up really well.
The most impressive tech demos coming out these days are ones from Epic Games in my opinion, but that’s because they have the combined power of impressive tech, a hugely popular engine to sell that tech to, and a massive army of artists to enlist to showcase their engine’s latest features in the best possible light.
I always loved these. Every time I upgraded to a new Nvidia GPU, I'd download the tech demos for that specific GPU and just watch them in awe.
I am really surprised at how big of a jump the early 1990s vs early 2000s were - while these days, people would play a 10 year old game and praise the graphics.
One of your best video!!!
The 2010 tech demo looks somehow better than 50% of games realeasing now xD
Ain't is strange? haha
You have to be high to think that
@@kubamax9kubowski176 i mean the damage model part. That technology feels lost but would make games look so much better
2:02 "Beautifully lit underwater scene"
Small pond impresses me even today
13:47 IMAGINE RE-VOLT 2 LIKE THIS
finally, someone mentioned Re-Volt
Check out Volt Recharge
you're telling me it's not!!?! and what game is this?
Damn now I want it
yes
Very nice evolution my friend😁👌
Thank you!
I remember most of them 😍
Wow I never knew some of these existed, they looked very impressive for their time
That small pond looks great to this day
I think the nvidia FX series was the biggest jump in graphics
Because they gotten effort to even make what we consider boring lighting and shading in 2000
tbh i think that might go to the geforce 400 series imo
FX series was one of the biggest failures in Nvidia history
@@joshtheserious8633 Absolutely, anyone saying otherwise didn't have one at the time.
@@esppiral ATi Radeon 9000 > NVIDIA GeForce FX 5000 (at the time)
📌 *TIMESTAMPS*
00:00 [NVIDIA GeForce 256 Graphics Cards]
Bubble (1999)
Grass (2000)
Crystal Ball (2000
00:45 [GeForce 2-Series Graphics Cards]
Lightning (2000)
Small Pond (2000)
Toy Soldier (2000)
Grove (2000)
Creature (2001)
02:03 [GeForce 3-Series Graphics Cards]
Principles of Shading (2001)
Chameleon (2001)
Zoltar the Magnificent (2001)
02:49 [GeForce 4-Series Graphics Cards]
Wolfman (2001)
Bugs (2002)
Tidepool (2002)
Squid (2002)
03:43 [GeForce FX-Series Graphics Cards]
Time Machine (2003)
Last Chance Gas Ultra (2003)
Ogre (2003)
Toys (2003)
Vulcan (2003)
05:22 [GeForce 6-Series Graphics Cards]
Clear Sailing (2004)
Timbury (2004)
Blobby Dancer (2004)
06:23 [GeForce 7-Series Graphics Cards]
Mad Mod Mike (2005)
GeoForms (2006)
07:04 [GeForce 8-Series Graphics Cards]
Box of Smoke (2006)
Froggy (2006)
Cascades (2007)
Human Head (2007)
08:11 [GeForce GTX 400-Series Graphics Cards]
Design Garage (2010)
Unigine Heaven Benchmark (2010)
Supersonic Sled (2010)
Stone Giant (2010)
09:38 [GeForce GTX 500-Series Graphics Cards]
Alien vs. Triangles (2010)
Endless City (2010)
10:22 [GeForce GTX 600-Series Graphics Cards
G-SYNC Pendulum Demo (2013)
10:45 [GeForce GTX TITAN]
“Ira”, Lifelike Human Face Rendering (2013)
11:11 [GeForce GTX 900-Series Graphics Cards]
Apollo 11 Lunar Landing Demo (2015)
11:40 [GeForce RTX 20-Series Graphics Cards]
Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition DLSS Benchmark (2018)
Justice RTX Tech Demo (2019)
Atomic Heart RTX Tech Demo (2019)
Reflections RTX Tech Demo (2019)
13:03 [GeForce RTX 30-Series Graphics Cards]
Marbles RTX Tech DEMO (2020)
The Attic RTX Tech DEMO (2020)
13:42 [GeForce RTX 40-Series Graphics Cards]
NVIDIA Racer RTX (2022)
14:11 Evolution of ALL Nvidia Benchmark Tech Demos
Geforce GTX 200 series?
10 series was a pretty legendary jump but no demo?
also no 700
You missed a few.
No 16 :(
I remember running human face at 5 fps lol, on the series it was supposed to run on, supersonic sledge was amazing tho.
The photorealistic face one is really impressive!
Lmao, the 2007 man's head looks better than 80% of the characters from 2024 games.
11:06 "most realistic human face yet - 2013"
Starfield: I'ma pretend I didn't see that
For a long time, PC graphics were leaps and bounds ahead of what was available on consoles. I used to love downloading the latest nvidia tech demos just to see if my computer could run them. I remember the wolfman demo running at like 5fps lol. I found it fascinating to look at the advancements in reflection and water graphics. The 1999-2000 demos bring back some fond memories. It was fun time to be a kid and into computers.
Nowadays I think pc graphics are even more ahead of consoles
@@Henrybramthis is just my feeling, I have no idea if it’s factually accurate, but it seems like today most PC games can still be tuned down to work on consoles. It’s essentially just effects like ray tracing that make them look more impressive, they aren’t using dramatically larger worlds or complex models or anything. Back in the day, it seemed as though there were many games that would be impossible to run on the consoles of the time no matter how you optimized them. I’m talking during the PlayStation era. But it may have just been a difference in development software and proprietary hardware of consoles. Maybe now it’s all a lot more universal.
@@okitasan I aggree but the thing is for consoles back then we're usually graphically more powerful than pcs unless u get the best of the best pc the. The pc is much better, but also graphically the old nvidia GPUs were so impressive for the time
Diminishing returns. As graphics get better, it takes exponentially more effort to make things look a little more realistic.
I guarantee it won't be long until even mobile games barely look worse than PC games
The PS1, PS2 and PS3 tech demos looked way more impressive. Some games like Crash Bandicoot or Rascal could also pass as tech demos in their own right.
Also comparing tech demos is not a good way to see the power of a hardware because its non applicable in real time game scenarios.
Hey! Wait a moment. Where is Nalu, Dusk, Dawn, Medusa and Adrian Curry?
Sexist and woke and racism and diversity and equity and inclusion
Exactly my thoughts, he missed the most iconic ones.
yup, i called that too.
Nvidia has removed Dusk, Dawn, Nalu, Luna, Adrianne, Medusa and A New Dawn from their website along with any mention that these demos ever existed, because they have sexy women in them. Not politically appropriate anymore.
@@axipixel5811 we live in dark woke ages.
You missed one. The Geforce 3 had a demo that rendered, in real time, a scene from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I can forgive you missing it since it was never publicly released for download. Most people don't even know about it. It was super impressive for it's time.
I love it this video, thanks for make.
possible game faces in 2012 year : 10:45
Starfield in 2023: YES
2:42 uhh???💀
💀
What?
U cannot get a head 🗣️
@@leiilo It's weird lol
@@jannat-e-khoob 😂
I feel like we don't see a lot of this tech even in modern games.
Cool video! Thanks for showing some of those NVIDIA logos too! I think some demos are missing from this video. I remember one that showcased subsurface scattering, and there was one called Samaritan that comes to mind too
I didn't know about a lot of these. Every time I get a new graphics cards I have always enjoyed going back and trying older tech demos that used to make my system struggle and watching my system plow through them with ease. For example, I remember trying Unigine Heaven on my GTX 460 back in the day and it would really struggle with any of the medium/higher settings. Then my GTX 970 did fairly well on it but still wasn't flawless at Ultra. I wasn't until my GTX 1080 that it was able to blast through it on Ultra settings at 1080p, and it was very satisfying when it finally did. Cheers!
Cool, I thought I was the only one ! 😅
2:35 "...You're entering the dome of mental pain..."
11:37 I love this sound
Awesome Nostalgic throw back, should do a full evolution of Nvidia Tech Demos! Can't believe you left out A New Dawn!
at this point, we're not gonna be impressed until we see full-particle simulated scenes. in real time.
thanks for going straight to the point
OMG, did this bring back memories! Thanks for sharing.
Glad you appreciate it!
1999-2010 Finally a tech demo i can run on my pc with out it catching on fire
3:01 why does this look better than anything 343/ halo studios have ever made?
I was a PC tech in ‘99 and vividly remember all of these as they came out. Total nostalgic ride 😮 wow!
That must have been cool! The golden era for sure
@@GameEvolutions it was pretty amazing for sure. NVidia always had the best tech demos.
It's really mind-blowing how much graphics hopped in quality from 1999 to now.
Pond was clearly about manipulating vertices in the GPU. I love this stuff. I wish I could go back and start learning it and get into the industry when it was fresh.
The advances in tech was amazing for its time. Seems like things have really slowed down in the past 5 years.
Holy fuck I got a nostalgia hit from that 2:50 monster with a minigun. I am not even sure from where, but I remember as a kid playing a game which had that as a starting logo.
Unreal Tournament 2004. If you get the Editor's Choice edition, it comes with a gold version of that logo.
thanks for making this video now i can see nvidia tech demos history
All these explanations and then there is "Squid: Spooky sea creature."
To this day I'm still waiting for nVidia to release the Racer RTX demo to the public like they promised two years ago. At this point I'm confident that it's never going to come out.
Its seems, you only took the demos Nvidia currently lists, but sadly, they missed a few. E.g. Nalu Demo from 2004, which was mermaid with very beautiful long hair. She is actually hidden on the Geforce 6 card even in this video in the top left corner. Actually someone found out that Nvidia removed all demos with female characters, quite some iconic, but too sexy now? They are Dusk, Dawn, Nalu, Luna, Adrianne, Medusa and A New Dawn
I had all of those...lol
i remember dawn had a glitch were if you renamed the executable to 3dmark.exe, all of her clothes disappeared, and she was fully modeled below. that caused quite a stir at the time. they even re-released the demo without the glitch
Истина брат мой!
One of the things i love watching as time goes by, is theres always 1 studio that gets something really impressive to work thats singular about their game, then 10 years down the road when everybody else gets that same feature in their games and its properly appreciated just how difficult it is to get it to work, and you wonder how the hell someone figured it out with previous generation shit.
I love how most of these still hold up today
nice video and the explanation is great
Blows me away that things 10-20 years ago look better than characters made today from AAA developers. The last decade some developers have made barely any effort
Stop the cap it doesn't
??? where have you been bro
Box of Smoke still impresive even nowdays
and also Aliens vs Triangles
I remember the 1999 bubble! Wow that takes me back.
i was expecting a video like this for so long, im a nerd of PC Gaming evolution
I had just graduated high school and was building my own PC’s in the early 2000’s and I remember how you couldn’t keep up with the video card changes. A game that came out like a year after your video card already wouldn’t run on it. And I don’t mean would run poorly. I mean you couldn’t even start it up.
You are telling me back to those days if a game is older than your graphics card it's unlaunchable?
@@myballsishurtinggaming it depended on the game, but happened quite often. New features were being launched on new cards all the time. Cards didn't even have pixel shaders until 2001.
@@atrus3823 Oh ok then
Awesome video
great video! 10 series where?
All those tech demos and almost nothing got implemented, even today😂
Well yeah. That would require actual effort on the developer side. Thats why AMD is just copying tech after its been somewhat implemented
Imagine how we’ll look back on the current tech in the future
1:08 so you are telling me:this is 2000's Technology?
Right now people make memes about Water pshycis "omg pc is burning"
You're missing at least 12 demos, including the dawn, dusk and faeries demos.
They were removed by Nvidia, but I will add them to my next video!
god i love the look of these old tech demos
We have come a long way folks
we sure have!
The 2000s look so uncanny... It's crazy how all of that was just considered a normal tech demo...
I think Crysis series was the best showcase of Nvidia cards. Though these little demos have something charming with them
The improvements in 06 and 07 were insane
7:24 is there like a single game that used this type of smoke simulation? This looks advanced for 2024 but it’s from 2006??? I’ve literally never seen it before!
No. But anyway see Unreal Tournament 3 from 2007 in 4k, HDR, maxed out. And Mirror's Edge.
Mirrors edge is the goat @@ps4games164
1:35 "groove" lmao
That 1999 one must have blown people’s minds at the time
Damn, i'm old now! I do remember that 99 bubble!
What about Dusk, Dawn, Nalu, Luna, Adrianne, Medusa and A New Dawn??
I tested all tech demos from Nvidias website, which are all up for download. Thank you for watching!
I don't think he knows those were removed from there website, or doesn't care!
Those were the best ones
@@WrathDrago why they removed them? Something about skin exposure or something in those lines i suppose
@@RCmaniac667 Can't show curvy, buxom animated women in today overly sensitive society. That's why they removed them!
12:44 The saddest thing is seeing the amazing lighting and then the most horrendeous ghosting for reflections... As a kid I used to see a lot of demos both made by companies like nvidia or rad game tools and those made by randoms in the demoscene. Reflections used to be an artistic theme to such an extent back then, to the point it was the defining aesthetic factor of a good few graphical generations. Why the hell did it also seem acceptable to start reducing the resolution for reflections? Especially once we stopped having to use tricks such as doubling the environment and mimicking a player's moves just so a bathroom mirror could seem realistic. Not fully using a GPU's power for high resolution reflections seems the laziest thing possible in the name of "optimization". Reflections are literally the most important thing since many objects make use of it! In a whole scene, seeing large pixelated and blurry reflections for all the objects you pass by and immense ghosting trails because the road is wet therefore it has reflections... is simply unacceptable in 2024.
I still remembered the Nvidia Geforce water promo on Bbc.. I watched it and bought the card.. ❤
In 2008 it stopped being impressive
2013 was very impressive
Are you seriouslu trying to tell me marbles doesn't look photoreal
They were all impressive
@@rudeskalamander Nope
7:07 "Pain Killer" is 2004. Perfect works on GeForce-4 ti series
*UNIGINE* is not an NVidia demo.
It is a Russian graphic engine, mostly used in industrial and military applications. They did the demo that was useful for benchmarking, though.
Changing my Riva TNT2 16MB for a GeForce DDR 32MB in 2001 was by far the biggest improvement I've ever experienced in the realtime 3D world .. everything went from unplayable to super smooth, with all the 3D features turned on .. and no crashes, no bugs, never .. the GeForce SDR was already a good card, but a bit slow because of its memory .. the GeForce DDR fixed that, with pretty much the performance of the very expensive, highend GeForce 2 GTS .. but way cheaper .. so it was such a milestone, game changing card for me back in those days ..
Honestly they had me at the pond in 2000. Jesus that looks amazing for the time.
7:27 Whoa, when did we get this big jump all of a sudden? This still looks good today!
Most likely HD wide-screen monitors got cheaper
why does water in 2001 nvidia tech demos looks better than in current triple A games
I really want to try these bubble demos, want to listen to todays ultra bass boosted music and see how they react
Any reason you skipped the Fairy and the Mermaid tech demos? Those were graphically impressive for their time and stood out as company mascots in advertising.
People before 2000: Wow!!! A shiny sphere!!! It is absolutely fantastic !!
Where's the Mermaid? I love that demo
GROOVE
I'm feeling funky after this one boys
The saddest thing is that many of the technologies in the demo were not used in games in those years, although video cards could...
Very different having something rendered in an empty space compared to wide, dense environments with multiple things going on.
The ones from the 2000s are insane for their time
After the early 2000s I have never had an Nvidia graphics card that was actually able to deliver completely on all of its promises