It was the peak of the Cold War, and President John F Kennedy responded to years of Russian dominance in space by committing that we would take a man to the moon and back again. With the Apollo 11 mission, that oath was fullfilled.

Or was it?

There are conspiracy theorists who believe that the photos are forgeries because of inconsistencies in the lighting. Why can Buzz Aldrin be seen when he is in a shadow? Why aren’t there any stars? Did we just see a studio light?

Powered by NVIDIA Maxwell™ GPU architecture and Epic’s UE4 and using NVIDIA’s Voxel Global Illumination (or VXGI) we explore the Apollo 11 landing site and put the landmark photo of Buzz Aldrin descending to the moon’s surface to the test.

VXGI (Voxel Global illumination)

VXGI is the next step in lighting for gaming and, in simple wording, a new real-time global illumination engine technology. Global illumination is often used in the movie industry to produce CG scenes. VXGI is based on using a 3D structure (Voxels) to capture coverage and lighting information at every point in a scene. This data structure can then be traced during the final stage of rendering to precisely determine the effect of light bouncing around in the scene. VXGI provides improved performance for global illumination. This software algorithm will only work with Maxwell GPUs.

No this is not a photo - it is a scene from an Nvidia tech demo with VXGI in full effect

The performance hit is dynamic as it is scalable due to the number of steps and cones you use to render. It is a real-time practical solution for gaming at 40 to 60 FPS with incredible lighting detail. It will be available to developers through Nvidia Gameworks.