NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 Ultra demo "Human Head" delivers a startling leap forward in realism for real-time characters. A new sum-of-Guassians formulation of subsurface scattering within a multi-layered skin model coupled with the blazing shading performance of GeForce 8800 Ultra enables rendering of realistic human skin at a level never before seen in real-time.

To evaluate the complex skin shader and HDR lighting, "Human Head" computes 17 offscreen textures every frame totaling over 40 Million pixels, each shaded with lengthy pixel shaders. That's more than 1.2 billion pixels every second! 4096 x 4096 color and normal textures provide photo-realistic detail even at extremely close ranges. All this shading and texture processing requires both a level of shader performance and memory bandwidth unavailable until now thanks to GeForce 8800 Ultra.

The presets at the lower left allow quick access to a variety of lighting rigs and the menu controls allow complete control of light positions. The Shader FX menu allows control of the translucency of the skin (the "waxy" slider) as well as controls for chrome skin (or even a mix of skin and chrome). The number keys "1" through "5" show some of subsurface scattering textures that are computing each frame when evaluating the skin shader. "0" restores normal rendering.

Special thanks to actor Doug Jones (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) for allowing us to use his likeness to deliver the next level in realistic real-time characters.