Nvidia, with a rather gifted bit of marketing, has used the new Maxwell-based GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards... to prove that we did indeed land some astronauts on the Moon. By using Maxwell's new voxel-based global illumination (VXGI) tech, plus a version of Unreal Engine 4 with global illumination enabled, Nvidia reconstructed the famous photo of Buzz Aldrin climbing down the ladder of the Apollo 11 lunar lander in 3D -- and apparently, they found evidence that will forever silence the conspiratorial lunar landing loons.
In all honesty, Nvidia's "proof" -- a 10 minute video (embedded below) -- is a bit thin. Basically, Nvidia tackles two common arguments used by conspiracy theorists: a) Buzz Aldrin on the shaded side of the lander, so why is he so well illuminated? and b) Why can't you see any stars in the sky? The second question is very easily answered: It's effectively daytime on the Moon (that's why it's so bright), and cameras don't have the dynamic range to capture a bright foreground and the tiny specks of light produced by stars.
The first question has a slightly more interesting answer -- but I'll let you find out for yourself by watching the video:
We touched on it last week when Nvidia officially launched the Maxwell GPU, but voxel-based global illumination (VXGI) could turn out to be a very exciting technology indeed. Global illumination is essentially the difference between the very "hard" light that we usually associate with computer games, and the "soft" light of reality, or high-quality pre-rendered computer graphics (architectural stuff, CG animated movies, etc). In technical terms, global illumination is the accurate modeling of diffuse reflections and refracted light off objects in a scene. A plastic chair or white spacesuit might not reflect light like a mirror, but it still has a very significant impact on the overall lighting of a scene -- and that's what GI does. GI is historically very computationally expensive -- which is why it has been eschewed by video games -- but Nvidia's new voxel-based approach is efficient enough that real-time 3D games can use it.Read: Photorealism in Unreal Engine 4 in real-time: A sneak peek at next-gen games graphics
While I admire Nvidia's efforts to prove that we didn't fake the six Apollo Moon landings, I personally prefer the fact that we actually have photos -- taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter -- of the Apollo 15 Descent Stage, and the various tracks made by rovers and astronauts.Apollo 17 landing site, photographed by LRO Apollo 15 landing site, imaged by LRO
Nvidia's efforts also highlight another terrifying possibility that conspiracy theorists probably haven't entertained before now: What if the US government secretly discovered voxel-based global illumination, some 40 years before Nvidia? What if the US government, helped by SGI and Sun Microsystem's secretive R&D divisions, had access to terascale supercomputers decades before the rest of the world? What if every photo we've ever seen of the surface of the Moon or Mars was rendered by an aircraft hangar-sized vacuum tube supercomputer that's powered by its own small nuclear plant? Nah, surely not...Now read: Nvidia Maxwell GTX 980 and GTX 970 reviewed: Crushing all challengers