14 DAY TRIAL // If ever you doubted that Neil Armstrong's first words upon touching down on the moon did not, in fact, come from the moon, NVIDIA says that you can put your fears to rest: the moon landing really happened.
We've seen it happen lots of time. Someone, or a group of someones, claims to have done or discovered something, and they even produce evidence to uphold their claims. But due to human skepticism, most of the populace doesn't believe them.
Alternatively, something might happen that isn't so amazing, which people speculate upon and eventually start such rumors that the tales become a lot more fanciful than the truth.
Conspiracy theories arise from the mire of these communication disasters all the time. Some of them really stand out, though. The moon landing is one event whose legitimacy finds itself contested.
Space may be the final frontier but it's made in a Hollywood basement
Well, that's what some people believe anyway. Or a lot of people, depending on who you ask. The bottom line is that some people can't believe that astronauts really made it to the moon.
It never really took away from the near-mythical status gained by Neil Armstrong's first words upon stepping on the moon.
Still, NVIDIA thought that it would be great to finally debunk the conspiracy theories about the moon landing being a hoax.
It also provided a great opportunity to show just how great its Maxwell GPU architecture is, or at least is supposed to be.
The NVIDIA Voxel Global Illumination technology
Voxel Global Illumination is a new feature of NVIDIA GPUs, which calculates how light deflects off objects in real time. Basically, it’s the closest thing to enabling realistic lighting in a virtual environment. Game dynamic lighting of before has nothing on it.
Back in July, NVIDIA got the idea to use VGL to research the moon mission and make a 3D model of the whole moon landing scene from the photo of Armstrong stepping on the moon surface.
After they had adjusted all the objects as close as possible to the real-life luminosity parameters, they finally added the light source (the sun). The result was a simulation that fits the picture almost perfectly.
Why this proof is as good as you can find
Because there were very few means to doctor photos back when the Apollo 11 mission happened in 1969, and they had nothing on Photoshop.
So unless NVIDIA is lying to us for whatever reason, you can rest assured that the photo of Neil Armstrong was not a hoax. Besides, since every GeForce GTX 980/970 card has VGI, presumably anyone can duplicate the experiment.
