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Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

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Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#21

Post by henning »

A big part of what video cards do is not focused on models. It's focused on lighting and shading. That's what gives games realism, something completely lacking in these demo scenes.

Make a tech demo that blows Crysis out of the water that runs in software on commodity hardware and we'll talk.

Hire some fucking artists if you need to. Saying "this is just programmer art" is a copout. It's like a slacker student who says "I could get straight As if I studied more and did my homework".

I'm not unwilling to entertain radical ideas but you need to show something more than flythroughs with lighting reminiscent of Quake II.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#22

Post by jrockway »

justinsb wrote: post #18

Given we're on a collective patent kick at the moment, this is surely the perfect example of why we have software patents. If we assume this to be real, who here would like to have spent years working on this, only for ATI and NVIDIA to reap all the rewards?

ATI and Nvidia would still have to write code to make it work. That's the hard part, not coming up with the idea.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#24

Post by calcnerd256 »

jonnycowboy wrote: post #17
chrischen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understood correctly, it seems to resemble a search engine in that it takes all the dots that compose the 3D world and search for the ones that need to be displayed to compose the 2D image on the screen at any given viewing angle? If that is correct, then I think the search engine example is pretty good at explaining it.

Graphics cards already have this functionality, it's nothing new.

Not arbitrarily. Make sure it's nothing new before you say it is. How complicated is the predicate they're searching?

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#25

Post by houseabsolute »

henning wrote: post #21

A big part of what video cards do is not focused on models. It's focused on lighting and shading. That's what gives games realism, something completely lacking in these demo scenes. Make a tech demo that blows Crysis out of the water that runs in software on commodity hardware and we'll talk. Hire some fucking artists if you need to. Saying "this is just programmer art" is a copout. It's like a slacker student who sa…

And while you're at it get someone who can give a presentation.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#26

Post by fizx »

jrockway wrote: post #22
justinsb wrote: post #18

Given we're on a collective patent kick at the moment, this is surely the perfect example of why we have software patents. If we assume this to be real, who here would like to have spent years working on this, only for ATI and NVIDIA to reap all the rewards?

ATI and Nvidia would still have to write code to make it work. That's the hard part, not coming up with the idea.

Bullshit.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#27

Post by justinsb »

jrockway wrote: post #22
justinsb wrote: post #18

Given we're on a collective patent kick at the moment, this is surely the perfect example of why we have software patents. If we assume this to be real, who here would like to have spent years working on this, only for ATI and NVIDIA to reap all the rewards?

ATI and Nvidia would still have to write code to make it work. That's the hard part, not coming up with the idea.

Are you serious? Figuring out the algorithm is absolutely the hard bit here. When was the last time you had trouble implementing an algorithm?

I feel like I'm feeding a troll here - I had to check your profile to be sure I wasn't. I think you're letting your dislike of patents warp your normally intelligent viewpoints.

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#28

Post by Luc »

hristov wrote: post #6

I listened to their explanation and it sounds a bit shady. First they used that old salesman trick of using a British accent to appear smart, so that was already a red flag. And then their explanation of the secret to their technology sounded rather ridiculous. They said that their technology was like the google search engine or like searching for the word "money" in an MS word document (the latter was the lamest att…

Come on, there's a lot to be critical about in this video, but do you honestly think he faked a British accent to appear smart? There's a few million of them that talk like that, you know. And the word search for money being lame subliminal messaging? Really?

Re: Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards

#29

Post by [deleted] »

mullr wrote: post #10
mullr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Through many mentions of the word "unlimited", never once was the word "storage" mentioned, or "cache" or "memory". How about the design toolchain? The only solution I can think of is to store all the assets as ... polygons. Unless there is toolchain support for a CSG/procedural approach.

Another thing I wonder is, if their "search" system, what kind of indexing is required? How long does it take, and can you re-index on the fly? Their demos have a conspicuous lack of any kind of movement at all, much less dynamic geometry. And what about shading? Shading typically require surface normals, something that's not readily available from a mess of points in 3d.

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