Ten years after their original "Dawn" tech demo, Nvidia has brought back the curvaceous fairy and her lush magical forest environment for another showcase of their latest graphics hardware, appropriately titled "A New Dawn".

A new blog post over on geforce.com describes the various effects and techniques used in the demo, boasting the many improvements since Dawn's original outing.

The original Dawn demo had many merits, but due to the limitations of hardware at the time, it also took many short cuts. One of the most obvious was the fact that Dawn didn't really have a home. Fairies, as we all know, live in the depth of mysterious forests, but for Dawn, her home was a giant glowing cube map—a six-sided texture that represented the environment around her. She had no trees to climb, no bees or butterflies to play with. She was a very lonely fairy.

In A New Dawn, the demo starts not with the main character, but with a sweeping overview of a lush rainforest. Ferns gently sway in the moonlight, vines sprawl across an ancient tree, and budding flowers cast a gentle glow on the surrounding bark. As our character comes into view, we find her swinging on a vine in her new tree home. The tree is rendered to the finest level of detail using DirectX 11 tessellation. At its peak, over four million triangles are used to showcase Dawn's environment.

The demo is designed to showcase the prowess of Nvidia's flasgship GTX 690 card, and PC gamers can download an 800MB installer (locally here on AusGamers files) to check out the showcase in real-time on their own system. If your rig doesn't quite have the muscle to run A New Dawn, you can watch the trailer below, or click here for our HD video page.

Was that the Geforce 3 demo? I remember when I got a Geforce 3 and could finally run the shader test in 3dmark 2000, the one with the grass swaying in the wind and the river and stuff, it blew my mind.