Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by greendestiny » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 6:36 AM UTC

redthrowaway wrote: post #69

greendestiny wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it's probably incredibly difficult to do with the added memory and bandwidth restrictions.

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

#72

Post by redthrowaway » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 6:37 AM UTC

JeanPierre wrote: post #11

saulrh wrote: post #2

I'll say the same thing now as I said last time these guys released a video: I'll believe it when I see them make a single blade of grass move, or when they place a single dynamic light source and cast a single dynamic shadow. Until then, this technology is awesome, but more or less useless.

What is somewhat disappointing is that they don't tell if they have managed to solve these issues or not, as they were clearly commented on one year ago. Another major issue is the RAM-usage, as point cloud data will require a lot of memory. Their claims of being 100,000 times better than current technology is also "frustrating", as it is repeatedly mentioned as if you've for some strange reason forgot it in the last…

It seems they're getting around the RAM issue by procedurally generating their objects. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I want to see it in something approaching a consumer game before I'll believe it. Carmack seems to think the next-gen consoles might be able to handle it, so if they can push out their SDK within a year, it might just power the next Crisis. Assuming, that is, the technology is actually useful.

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

#73

Post by corysama » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 6:40 AM UTC

chime wrote: post #28

palish wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can be, and that's likely how it will work. Triangle animated characters + voxel static world.

Then why is everyone here complaining about the lack of dynamic objects?

Because they describe the tech as if was the answer to everything. It can do specific things very well and other things not at all. If they toned down the hype and were clear about the limitations, they would get nothing but love.

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

#74

Post by chipsy » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 6:45 AM UTC

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...

By "production issues" I would think "pipeline" first of all. It doesn't matter if it's possible to convert a high-res mesh to an optimized voxel format, if the result takes hours of compilation. That is too long an iteration time for a single asset.

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

#75

Post by sliverstorm » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 6:53 AM UTC

starwed wrote: post #66

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.

I wouldn't go as far as "amazingly convincing". I think they look better after you've been staring at the HL2 world for a while, rather than the real world.

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

#76

Post by coffeemug » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 6:54 AM UTC

I think what they're doing is great, but I see two problems with their presentation. First, computer rendering techniques are extremely well understood and well researched. We've picked the low hanging fruit, much of the high hanging fruit, and everything in between. There is no "groundbreaking new technology" to be invented. They're converting polygons into voxels (although each voxel is probably a sphere for cheaper computation), and using software ray-tracing to render in real time. Since ray-tracing is trivially parallelizable, the multicore technology is just about there now. A 12-core machine will give just about 20FPS. The reason why they can get away with an incredible amount of detail is that ray-tracing diffuse objects is fairly independent of the number of visible polygons in the scene.

The second problem is that 10^4x improvement in level of detail does not mean 10^4x aesthetically pleasing (or in fact, more aesthetically pleasing at all). Ray tracing gets very expensive the moment you start adding multiple lights, specular materials, partially translucent materials, etc. It is very, very difficult to do that in real-time even with standard geometry, let alone with 10^4x more polygons. This is why their level doesn't look nearly as good as modern games despite higher polygon count (compare it to the unreal demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttx959sUORY) They only use diffuse lighting and few lights. In terms of aesthetic appeal of a rendered image, lighting and textures are everything.

Furthermore, one of the biggest impacts on how aesthetically pleasing a rendered images looks is made by global illumination. That's also something that's extremely difficult to do in real time with raytracing, but is possible with gpu hardware with tricks. The trouble is, these tricks look much better than raw polygons.

Again, I love what they're doing. Real-time ray-tracing is without a doubt the future of graphics, but it would be nice if they were a little less sensational about the technology, and more open about the limitations and open issues.

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

#77

Post by Geee » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 7:31 AM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #76

I think what they're doing is great, but I see two problems with their presentation. First, computer rendering techniques are extremely well understood and well researched. We've picked the low hanging fruit, much of the high hanging fruit, and everything in between. There is no "groundbreaking new technology" to be invented. They're converting polygons into voxels (although each voxel is probably a sphere for cheape…

This is somewhat the state-of-the-art in realtime ray-tracing (actually path-tracing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qntMz2QPA_E using the Brigade renderer. It's using both the GPU and CPU.

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

#78

Post by gavanwoolery » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 7:37 AM UTC

As someone who has worked with GPUs and software renderers for over a decade:

I am pretty sure that their tech depends on a few types of repeatable data, which they are able to cache effectively based on rotation -- in other words, they have come up with an efficient way of querying the front-facing voxels in a large set of data based on the resulting view matrix. Where this falls flat is if the data is not procedural, or it is not diverse - as you can see in the video, there is a bunch of the same data copied over and over. However you compress it, such detail is not free and I am guessing there is a lot of data that depends on a good deal of memory/storage to work properly.

I am not so worried about animation or dynamic lights or textures as everyone else is. If they can render it to a buffer and get the normals/depth/UV coordinates, the rest of the rendering can be done in screen-space, including SSAO, deferred lighting, and similar rasterization tricks. Animation can also be rendered on top of the scene, and intersected with the former depth buffer. The only thing I am worried about is the size of the data set and ability to create more diverse landscapes.

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

#79

Post by niklas_a » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 7:42 AM UTC

Geee wrote: post #77

coffeemug wrote: post #76

I think what they're doing is great, but I see two problems with their presentation. First, computer rendering techniques are extremely well understood and well researched. We've picked the low hanging fruit, much of the high hanging fruit, and everything in between. There is no "groundbreaking new technology" to be invented. They're converting polygons into voxels (although each voxel is probably a sphere for cheape…

This is somewhat the state-of-the-art in realtime ray-tracing (actually path-tracing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qntMz2QPA_E using the Brigade renderer. It's using both the GPU and CPU.

That game looks like it has been filmed with a cheap digital camera with the ISO setting too high.

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

#80

Post by wlievens » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 7:45 AM UTC

nosignal wrote: post #60

saulrh wrote: post #2

I'll say the same thing now as I said last time these guys released a video: I'll believe it when I see them make a single blade of grass move, or when they place a single dynamic light source and cast a single dynamic shadow. Until then, this technology is awesome, but more or less useless.

Even if it's absolutely impossible to animate this technology I don't think it would be "useless". I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to have the static elements (buildings, tree trunks, ground, debris, etc etc) of a level rendered using this tech, and polygons used for everything else. It used to be this way in the bad old days (Doom etc) - Polygons for level structure and sprites for animation. This would at l…

"polygons for everything else" would mean you integrate two completely different rendering methods in one pipeline. I won't say that's impossible, but it sure sounds non-trivial.