Remember Square Enix’s Agnis Philosophy tech demo? What a brilliant piece of demo that was, right? A lot of gamers were wondering what kind of GPU was powering this beast, as we were getting visuals similar to CG quality with constant 60fps. Some thought that it was Nvidia’s GTX690 cards powering it, while others thought that those visuals could only be achieved by a quad-SLI system. Well, seems that everyone was wrong as the Agnis Philosophy Tech Demo was running on a single, Nvidia GTX680 card.
In a huge interview with RPGSite, Yoshihisa Hashimoto said that all the parts – that have been used for running the Agnis Philosophy Tech Demo – are things readily available in the PC market right now. RPGSite pushed a little to find out what graphics card was powering Square Enix’s demo and although Hashimoto didn’t reveal its name, he said that ‘what I can say is that what we’re using is about the equivalent as what is being used by any other companies for their tech demos.‘
The equivalent as what is being used by any other companies huh? Well, we do know that Epic Games demonstrated Unreal Engine 4 on a single GTX 680. And we do know that Crytek used a GTX 680 for their CryEngine 3 tech demos. Gearbox has also used Nvidia’s GTX 680 cards to showcase the PC, PhysX accelerated, version of Borderlands 2. It’s also no secret that Nvidia’s GTX 6xx series was heavily used in this year’s E3 and we also know that the freshly released GTX 690 was not used by any company to showcase their tech demos.
Put these things together, and you get the card that powered the Agnis Philosophy Tech Demo. In other words, yes. Agnis Philosophy was running on a single GTX 680. In addition, the build that was demonstrated was not optimized at all, meaning that Square Enix could actually produce these graphics in real-time (when all physics, AI, and animations are added to the mix).
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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