Nvidia's New Dawn demo now downloadable

Nvidia dragged its former fairy mascot Dawn out of retirement this year for the tech demo A New Dawn, showing off how realistic a character PCs can render if they throw hefty hardware at the problem. You can now download and run the demo yourself, if you're packing an Nvidia GTX 670 or better.

The demo shows off 40,000 tessellated strands of dynamic hair, subsurface scattering, detail maps, depth-of-field blur, tone mapping, and heaps of other effects one can apply liberally when there's only one character and no game logic to run.

A New Dawn was originally created to show off the GeForce GTX 690, but Nvidia's added a less-pretty, less-demanding mode so more people can try it. Download the demo here, if your PC meets the following requirements:

• GPU: GTX 670 or 680 (GTX 670 SLI, GTX 680 SLI, or GTX 690 recommended for Ultra mode)

• CPU: 2.5GHz Dual-Core or higher

• System Memory: 4GB

• Disk Space: 2GB

• Operating System: Windows 7 or Vista

Or, if your PC is built of wishes and hopes and dreams and determination rather than rocks and knives and bullets and bulging biceps, you can simply watch A New Dawn in video form.