Play with DirectX 10, finally

THOSE OF YOU with phat GeForce 8800s kicking their heels for DX10 content finally have something to play with. Even if it is just a tech demo.

You can check it out here. It's dubbed the Variance Shadow Maps Demo (D3D10), and, unsurprisingly, it demonstrates variance shadow maps under Direct3D 10. It's programmed by a chap called AndyTX, and it looks pretty funky in action.

You can open it up and play with a bunch of the different variables to get different shadow effects, and there is plenty of techy documentation in case you want to understand exactly how this works. Apparently, "int32 is also really awesome for summed-area tables" and "the splits are rendered into a texture array and the applicable split is computed in the fragment shader when shading the scene". Obviously.

The demo appears to be part of the GPU Gems 3, the latest graphics programming handbook to come out Nvidia, and the source will be included in that. To get it up and running you'll need Vista, a DX10 card, the latest DX10 redistributable and the latest Visual C++ package. Check it out, and let us know if it knocks your little LCD socks off. µ