Can you tell which photo is from the real moon landing and which is a Nvidia render?
Nvidia
Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon almost 50 years ago, but some conspiracy theorists don’t believe that it actually happened. The debate includes plenty of science and pseudoscience as proof, but one point theorists make is that the lighting in the moon landing video is off. They claim that Buzz Aldrin wouldn’t be illuminated (as seen in the photo above) because he was standing in the shadow of the Apollo 11.
Graphics computing company Nvidia is proving these conspiracists wrong.
In 2014, Nvidia was able to use its GeForce GTX graphics processing units (GPU) to realistically render the way light would behave on the moon, creating a near identical image of Buzz Aldrin backlit by the light bouncing off Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit.
Four years later on Oct. 11, Nvidia recreated its moon landing recreation with its new Turing GPU tech. Turing comes with real-time ray-tracing technology, which can capture the reflection of light as it happens. To demo this, Nvidia turned its moon landing recreation into a video. You can watch it below:
Nvidia’s tech can simulate light physics to make things look the way they should look. With it Nvidia determined that it would’ve been impossible to artificially create the moon landing in a studio in 1969, even if it were directed by Stanley Kubrick.