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Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

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Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#61

Post by 6ren »

prawn wrote: post #12

John Carmack's repsonse: "Re Euclideon, no chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging." https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422...

His latest tweet on it is interesting:

> @Foggen insufficient information to say if it is tracing or splatting.

They state their method is based on a well-known technique used in engineering and medical visualization, and splatting seems to be used there. I'm still not 100% clear on what splatting is, but there's a bunch of papers applying that term to voxels, e.g. http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/objewa/

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#62

Post by greendestiny »

AndrewMoffat wrote: post #55
palish wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic shadows work in exactly the same way as they do for standard triangle rasterization. Each light has a shadow map (which can be thought of as "the depth of the scene, from the point of view of the light"). During the final rasterization pass, the shadow map is sampled. If the sampled depth is less than or equal to the current fragment's depth, then the fragment is in light; otherwise it's in shadow. So, nothin…

from what i understand, the voxels more or less dynamically adjust their resolution according to their distance from the modelview origin (where the player is). if the engine generated dynamic shadow maps per light source, would'nt the voxels need to be high resolution with respect to each light source, so that the shadow map isn't a bunch of huge blocks? i imagine that alone would be a pretty big performance hit

The dynamic adjustment is traversing the voxel representation when you render the view. This kind of per-pixel shadow map requires rerendering the scene for each light source - but in more or less the exact same way that the player view is rendered. Then some work rectifying that information. So it would be a big performance hit, but not obviously any worse than normal rendering. Although did someone say it was only running at 20fps as it was?

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#63

Post by greendestiny »

6ren wrote: post #61
prawn wrote: post #12

John Carmack's repsonse: "Re Euclideon, no chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging." https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422...

His latest tweet on it is interesting: > @Foggen insufficient information to say if it is tracing or splatting. They state their method is based on a well-known technique used in engineering and medical visualization, and splatting seems to be used there. I'm still not 100% clear on what splatting is, but there's a bunch of papers applying that term to voxels, e.g. http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/objewa/

Splatting is when you draw with a point cloud but fill in in-between the points to make a solid surface during the rendering. It's only necessary if you get close enough to your point cloud that the points don't map to adjacent pixels.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#64

Post by vrode »

I'm sorry, but as much as I respect people both on Reddit and Hacker News, I wonder where does all the enthusiasm come from, when:

* demos show nothing new from a technological perspective

* the presenter sounds like a door-to-door salesperson

* as it seems to me, the only purpose of the demo is to raise a hype and somehow (I still don't understand) they succeeded

Euclideon got financed by Australian government.

I really hope the board took a critical approach and relied on at least /some/ technical expertise to grant these people A$ 2m. If they made this decision based just on a demo - I'm moving to Australia at once, where I will invent a technology you have never seen in your whole life before. Ever.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#65

Post by stickfigure »

monochromatic wrote: post #59

Color me skeptical. However, I'd like to pose a question to HN: If the claims from this video are legit, is this level of innovation deserving of a patent? (Yes, a software patent.)

Maybe, you'd have to be an expert in rendering engines to know. Too bad none of those work for the patent office or are ever likely to.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#66

Post by starwed »

jxcole wrote: post #44

The most unrealistic things in video games for me are faces. While increasing polygon counts and such will certainly help, I can't help but notice that faces will never cross the uncanny valley unless they can do something about the lighting. Check out: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html So, unless they can do all this AND ray trace it at the same time, it really won't make my game experience 100,00…

Surely a lot of that is due, not to lighting/shadows/rendering, but to the incredible subtlety required of the animation?

HL2 has some pretty amazingly convincing faces, and that's obviously not because it has the best rendering engine.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#68

Post by prof »

mambodog wrote: post #33

Every time this comes up I like to point people to the Atomontage Engine[1], which takes (what I think is) a more pragmatic approach, combining voxel and polygon graphics. Voxels are used where appropriate (eg. landscape, destructible buildings) and polygons can be used for dynamic objects. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sfWYUgxGBE

Yea this looks awesome, i hope he gets fundings. I am listed on the donor-page yay ^^

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#69

Post by redthrowaway »

greendestiny wrote: post #62
AndrewMoffat wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from what i understand, the voxels more or less dynamically adjust their resolution according to their distance from the modelview origin (where the player is). if the engine generated dynamic shadow maps per light source, would'nt the voxels need to be high resolution with respect to each light source, so that the shadow map isn't a bunch of huge blocks? i imagine that alone would be a pretty big performance hit

The dynamic adjustment is traversing the voxel representation when you render the view. This kind of per-pixel shadow map requires rerendering the scene for each light source - but in more or less the exact same way that the player view is rendered. Then some work rectifying that information. So it would be a big performance hit, but not obviously any worse than normal rendering. Although did someone say it was only…

20 fps in software. They're still finishing hardware rendering.
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