Programs to demo a high-end video card?

Question

I'm the proud owner of an nVidia GTX 260, but I'm not a gamer. I bought the card to play around with CUDA programming, but I find myself tempted to see what kinds of great things a powerful graphics card can do.

I'm looking for recommendations for programs, games, or screen savers that will really show off this graphics card. The card is on a pretty reasonable machine (core i7, ssd, 6 GB RAM), so I don't think those will be a bottleneck.

Answer 1

Try FurMark (the testing and benchmarking game).

Also, GPU Caps Viewer and FluidMark.

Answer 2

Crysis. Turn everything as high as possible and it looks gorgeous.

Answer 3

Speak Visual with the card.
You need to read up individual demo links (learn more) to check which are applicable for you.
Some may be just patches to other software and others may not work on your card.
From what remains, you may not be interested in some.
But, could be interesting.

Answer 4

nVidia has a couple of cool demos that will make you feel good about your graphics card :)

debris is another excellent demo (196kb) from the folks who made the infamous 96kb 3D shooter kkrieger

Answer 5

Really Slick Screensavers look good.

Answer 6

rthdribl (Real-Time High Dynamic Range Image-Based Lighting) is relatively old now, but worth a look.