Nvidia simulates human head with Geforce GTX Titan

Realistically rendering a human face complete with realistic skin, lighting, facial expressions and animations is one of the graphics world’s most difficult problems, especially when it all has to happen in real time. Complex models and advanced filters require massive amounts of computing power, but now new possibilities are opening up with the world’s fastest graphics processor.

At the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia is showing graphics demo Digital Ira, the sequel to the old Human Head. In the background is the self-developed software Face Works, which among other things optimizes the rendering process to make it possible to realistically simulate a human head in real time.

For the simulation, skin shaders are used, which execute over 8,000 instructions per pixel. 1080p resolution results in 82 billion flops per second (flops) per frame, or 4,900 billion flops per second at 60 frames per second – and this figure does not include the 161 filtered textures that must be retrieved per pixel.

This also includes 32 gigabytes of data needed to generate the human face and its animations, but Face Works reduces the size to a more manageable 300 megabytes. It can all be rendered with a single Geforce GTX Titan.