Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

ausgamers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 144 posts

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

#111

Post by siphr »

andrethegiant wrote: post #70

I remember when the first video came out, they said their technology worked "like Google" to find the appropriate pixels to display on the screen. No further description of the technology. Seems too vague to be true.

I think it is true but it is hype. Assuming it is based on voxels, then the earliest game engine to have used the technology (to my knowledge) is probably Blade Runner circa 1990s. The hardware at that time, ofcourse, dictated the quality of the tech at that time. By extrapolation I would say this is very much possible but may not be such a huge deal as it is made out to be. The results however could be amazing if widely adopted by the industry.

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

#112

Post by mikemaccana »

cgart wrote: post #95
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 video is not that fresh. I have seen it already last year and the way how this guys speaks has not changed since then (speaks like a salesmen) ;) Their technique is based on point cloud rendering. My supervisor has proposed already in 2004 how this can be done on a standard PC. Look at his PhD-Thesis [1]. This technique is usable for static objects as well as for dynamic objects; however, using it for dynamic sc…

> I have seen it already last year and the way how this guys speaks has not changed since then (speaks like a salesmen) ;)

+1. I'd actually trust the company more if they had someone who spoke in measured tones and laid off the hyperbole.

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

#113

Post by mhd »

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…

Faces do get better, and I'd be pretty content with something like Mass Effect 1 (not exactly state of the art anymore), unless we're going for very emotional scenes in close-ups -- where most real-life actors fail, too.

One problem where in my opinion the advances aren't exactly exponential is body language. If I'm looking at the NPC talking to me, it's not just his facial motions, teeth etc. that I'm aware of, it's also the movements of his body - shoulders, arms, etc. This is still pretty bad. Most of the time they're just flailing around in a pretty uncoordinated manner. It gets better for highly "scripted" scenes, but the usual "shrug / fist pump / scratch yourself" animations are bad. They've gotten pretty good at the purely physical parts, i.e. what muscles and body parts have to move if something connected to it moves (skeletal and muscular animation), but there needs to be a better "body language AI".

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

#114

Post by benjash »

tintin wrote: post #88
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…

And there are no moving objects in this demo. Voxel animations are much harder than poly animations. Then there is memory. The elephant is looking great, no doubt about that. But I think you will need a lot of space for it. On a PC this might work, but I'm not sure it can be used on consoles.

Agreed, not very impressed.

Realistic movement is a more important factor than detail, you can have 8 cubes move fluidly enough to immerse in. 1,0000,0000,0000 polygons seems un-important when you have pixel shader's and normal mapping.

Maybe they should of made duke nukem forever with this engine, as it seems like its from a similar era.

The new frostbite engine 2 a million times amazing, because of the dynamic lighting and radiosity. Plus the amazing fluidity of the animations.

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

#115

Post by lobster_johnson »

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…

Actually they say they're doing 20-30fps on 1 core.

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

#117

Post by gavanwoolery »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #78

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 procedura…

Also, for those interested in seeing a LIVE demo of very similar technology, there are many examples, but here is one:

http://voxels.blogspot.com

It is not likely to be the exact the same technique, but I am guessing they are using similar methods.

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

#118

Post by Troll_Whisperer »

Graphics don't improve linearly with the number of pixels or polygons added. I'd say the improvement is closer to logarithmic. E.g. 500 polygons/second is a step better than 50, 5000 is two steps better than 50, etc.

Improving the rate by 100,000 times is only a six step improvement and that's if they haven't surpassed the limits of the human eye. I much prefer 72 frames per second to 36, but giving me a thousand frames per second is a waste since my optic nerve can't process most of them.

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

#119

Post by dkersten »

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…

In terms of aesthetic appeal of a rendered image, lighting and textures are everything.

A thousand times this!

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

#120

Post by jxcole »

estel wrote: post #90
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…

What do you think of the LA Noire faces?

So much better than before...but still not quite where I would like them to be. I feel like a game like that made huge advances by using talented actors and scanning in the faces. They overcame a lot of the uncanny valley that was there before, but the shading still makes the whole scene seem unbelievable.

Still though, the artists and actors did a phenomenal job with this game.

Post reply on HN