One year after its debut, Epic Games' Samaritan Tech Demo is back at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) and it's there to tease the power of NVIDIA's Kepler 28 nm GPU. At last year's GDC Samaritan, which is based on Unreal Engine 3, was running in real-time on three GeForce GTX 580 cards set in SLI. This year Epic is showing off the demo running on a single NVIDIA Kepler graphics card.NVIDIA still isn't talking Kepler so instead it focused on the use of FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing) in Samaritan.

"Without anti-aliasing, Samaritan's lighting pass uses about 120 MB of GPU memory. Enabling 4x MSAA consumes close to 500 MB, or a third of what's available on the GTX 580. This increased memory pressure makes it more challenging to fit the demo's highly detailed textures into the GPU's available VRAM, and led to increased paging and GPU memory thrashing, which can sometimes decrease framerates," said Ignacio Llamas, a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA.

"FXAA is a shader-based anti-aliasing technique," however, and as such "doesn't require additional memory so it's much more performance friendly for deferred renderers such as Samaritan." By freeing up this additional memory developers will have the option of reinvesting it in additional textures or other niceties, increasing graphical fidelity even further."

To see a comparison between Samaritan with 4x MSAA and with FXAA 3 check out this page. The GTX 580-powered Samaritan can be viewed below.