The Game tests

The first game test: Jane Nash

Game Test 1: All of the usual suspects are featured here. Complex shadow maps. 16-bit floating point HDR lighting. Post-processing effects (motion blur, bloom, etc.). In addition to the usual suspects, the attention to physics is increased. There are particle systems and fluid surface simulations, seamlessly blended into the scene.

"Jane Nash" is remniscent of a 60's spy flick along the lines of James Bond crossed with Perfect Dark or No One Lives Forever. This indoor scene has complex geometry, simulations, and multiple dynamic lights. 3DMark Vantage's whitepaper notes:


The Jane Nash test scene represents a large indoor game scene with complex character rigs, physical GPU simulations, multiple dynamic lights, and complex surface lighting models. It uses several hierarchical rendering steps, including for water reflection and refraction, and physics simulation collision map rendering. The following features are specific to this scene:

Lots of static objects

Lots of complex dynamic skinned objects

Cascaded shadow maps using PCF filtering

Very few instanced objects

No ray-marching (volumetric) effects

Cloth simulation

Anisotropic materials (math-heavy)

Caustics

Hierarchical rendering passes to render water reflection and refraction




When you first view the scene, you might not feel as if it's better than the "best" first person shooters on the PC right now. Part of this is art direction, but a substantial difference is the cost of physics. Hierarchical rendering and game physics are best appreciated in motion and when the demo is only running in the single digit fps range for most PCs, it's easy to discount the test as being inefficient or not complex enough. In truth, we believe it'll be a good synthetic test going forward.