Horror games have seen a resurgence in recent years thanks to Slender Man and titles inspired by his success. The latest game seeking fame in the crowded genre is Daylight from Zombie Studios, a DirectX 11 first-person survival-horror set in an abandoned hospital with a dark past. Uniquely, Daylight offers a new challenge each and every time you play thanks to procedurally generated levels that shuffle the horrific game's building blocks.

Powered by Unreal Engine 4, Daylight is the most technologically advanced horror game seen to date. Under the hood, several NVIDIA-developed effects bolster Unreal Engine 4's graphical prowess, enhancing the game's dark, moody world with richer shadows and immersive special effects.

Daylight Technology Trailer featuring NVIDIA GameWorks

Check out the video showing how NVIDIA Turbulence and PhysX Cloth add to the intensity of the action.

Cloth and Smoke

NVIDIA GameWorks adds technology for GPU accelerated cloth and smoke. You can find out more about these products here:

NVIDIA HBAO+ Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion (AO) adds contact shadows where two surfaces or objects meet, and where an object blocks light from reaching another nearby game element. The AO technique used and the quality of the implementation affects the level of accuracy of shadowing, and whether new shadows are formed when the level of occlusion is low. Without Ambient Occlusion scenes can look flat and unrealistic, and objects can appear as if they are floating on surfaces. In Daylight, gamers can enable NVIDIA HBAO+, a new DirectX 11 AO technique that renders shadows at full resolution with an unprecedented 36 occlusion samples per AO pixel. Compared to other AO techniques, HBAO+ is more detailed and more precise, and has a significantly lower performance impact per occlusion sample.

HBAO+ is part of NVIDIA ShadowWorks.

NVIDIA HBAO+

NVIDIA Depth of Field

NVDOF enables developers to apply high-quality depth of field rendering to their games. In Daylight, this DirectX 11-powered effect increases the precision and image quality of depth of field blurring, and applies stylistic Bokeh blurring to out of focus lights.

NVDOF is found in NVIDIA PostWorks.

NVIDIA Depth of Field