If you're lucky enough to have an 8800 series graphics card running on Vista right now, I bet you'd love to see it in action with some DirectX 10 content if you could. Well now you can! - NVIDIA's demo team have just released to the masses their first DX10 creation, Cascades (weighing in at 168.6MB).

Keep in mind though, you'll need to update to the latest ForceWare 100.64 (non-official) drivers for it to work correctly.

More info on it over at Tech Report.

Early adopters of Windows Vista with GeForce 8800-series graphics cards are unfortunately stuck with beta, feature-incomplete graphics drivers for the time being. However, Nvidia has tried to make it up to those users somewhat by giving them front-row seats to what, as far as we know, is the first publicly available DirectX 10 demo. Dubbed Cascades, the demo is a 168.6MB download that requires not only a GeForce 8800 graphics card and a copy of Windows Vista to run, but also Nvidia's latest ForceWare 100.64 graphics drivers.

The Cascades demo implements all kinds of graphical goodies, including procedural geometry creation (the GPU generates an endless vertical rock formation on-the-fly), dynamic particle physics (the GPU performs physics calculations for water falling down the rock formation), and displacement mapping (bumps and crevices in the rock surface occlude each other). Judging by the few screenshots on Nvidia's website, the result is quite pretty indeed. Thanks to Beyond3D for the tip.