Nvidia proves the Moon Landing

Over the years the moon landing has been contested as being faked by many conspiracy theorists . Nvidia the video graphics maker has decided to resolve the questions regarding the moon landing themselves. With the announcement of Nvidia’s new video card technology, Nvidia released a video that shows using science that the Moon landing did indeed happen.

To show that the Moon landing wasn’t a hoax Nvidia’s game demo team used the company’s new GPU architecture Maxwell to digitally recreate one of the famous photos taken of the Moon landing. Along Nvidia used the Unreal Engine 4 game engine along with graphics card using the new Maxwell GPU to recreate the disputed photo.


The new Maxwell architecture comes in two of Nvidia’s newest video cards the GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 970. Which according to Nvidia are the “ most advanced GPUs ever made” and the advanced hardware allowed Nvidia to solve the complex lighting and graphics issues in recreating the Moon landing photo. The Maxwell GPU uses a technology called Voxel-Based Global Illumination (VXGI) which allows for a better representation of light bouncing off an object. VXGI can calculate how light bounces off objects, adding a richer, more lifelike sense of luminosity to game graphics. Nvidia Engineers used VXGI and the publicly available data for the luminosity of the objects on the moon to determine how light bouncing off of the lunar surface and the lunar lander would appear, and whether you’d see stars in the photo.

Maxwell Chip

Nvidia has an in depth write up about how they used their new Maxwell GPU to recreate the the historic photo on the Nvidia blog. This includes a breakdown on what specifically the Maxwell architecture did to recreate the moon landing photo. The new GeForce GTX 970 and GeForce GTX 980 GPUs were just released and they have been selling out as soon as they come in stock. The new video cards cost around $300 for the GTX 970 and $500 for the GTX 980 video cards.

By using their new GPU architecture to recreate the moon landing photo, Nvidia has clearly shown what their new Maxwell GPU can do. I was very impressed with everything the Nvidia team did while working on this.

Good job Nvidia.  Check out the video and link to Nvidia’s blog above for a more information about all the work that went into this project.

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