Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass w…
Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges
Does anyone have any theories as to how Nanite actually works? I've never heard of virtualized micropolygon geometry before and it sounds a bit buzzwordy. Do we think they are just loading the full model into GPU memory, or are they baking down various LODs and normal maps at compile time through some automatic process? Either way, it's a huge workflow improvement. It's just unclear what's actually happening...
“Micropolygon” I assume means Reyes rendering, I.e that the polygons are created on demand from underlying geometry. Instead of various LODs you tessellate when rendering, specifically for the view so each pixel has ~1 vertex. Walk closer to the statue and it gets more triangles in tesselation.
But how is it running so quickly? I've seen adaptive rendering implementations before, but they couldn't run in real time. If they are really using billions of polys they can't store them all in VRAM. Is the PS5 SSD fast enough to recalculate polys for every model in the scene every frame (Or even every few frames)?
What a magical demo! That made my day. I had largely written off console gaming as a never-ending sequence of brain-dead first person shooters. I'm glad to see real innovation in the graphics space - coupled with advances in AI and NLP, I think we could see a crop of incredibly realistic and meaningful games in the next few years. IMHO, a key innovation that still needs to occur is a shift away from flunky and unintu…
Minority report style hand waving is a dead end. Tactile feedback is a hard requirement for a decent hand controlled interface. But that doesn't mean we need to stick with traditional game controllers. Valve Index controllers give you buttons without the requirement to hold anything, plus far better tracking than any controller free tracking system.
I suppose it's a matter of acceptable approximations and cost. If only 2% of players have a high quality surround sound system, and only half of those have a good ear, then you really only have 1% of users who can tell the difference between raytraced audio and the heuristic "hacks" that sound engineers have spent decades developing. So I don't know if audio raytracing will become mainstream in games anytime soon. Bu…
You don't need a high quality sound system or a good ear to tell the difference though. You just need a pair of headphones and to be a human with hearing. Evolution has been at work for eons. Every human born is a powerful audio processing machine. I can't give you a rigorous proof or hand you a double blind test to try for yourself, so you'll have to accept an impasse or start going down a rabbit hole consisting of…
You should submit a patch to Godot, then! Force Unreal and others to implement it too.
I hope they name the authors of the theses that they used to achieve this. It's inconceivable to me that some dude sat down and decided how everything should be coded.
Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass w…
Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges
I also spent an inordinate amount of time getting rounded corners on a fan site blog I ran. I forgot about this.
So I'm going to join the naysayers here and say while the graphics look absolutely phenomenal the game itself looks the the same game I've been playing for 20-25 years. A 3rd person character who walks through caves, canyons, ruins, slides through tight places where the camera moves in close, can only climb on areas painted with the "you can climb here color" and then pushes or pulls a few knobs for "puzzles" It coul…
This was also what I thought of. I get the “this is a demo” but my first consideration after realizing the stale example gameplay was to think about what UE 5 would be most awesome for and it is VR / AR.
These flat “3D” experiences are like Duck Hunt to the kids in the retro bar in Back to the Future 2.
Wow. It seems like real-time lighting and detail are getting to the point where they're so indistinguishable from reality... ...that now it's the actual quality of the models themselves, and even more of character motion, that are going to have to be the next steps in better graphics. I'm stunned by the lighting and detail, absolutely stunned. But at the same time, especially when you get into the architectural rooms…
Yeah, this is looking so good now that we seem to have reached the uncanny valley of rendering. Where instead of thinking "this game has really good graphics" I'm now thinking "this reality has some bad graphics".
Oooh yeah; some of those rock faces were sharper than my short-sighted self would expect to see in real life.
Ray tracing is a scam to push more hardware we dont need. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNRp9Y33xWE Can you spot the difference worth >2-3x performance drop?
IMO, ray tracing is a scam as currently presented by Nvidia, et. al. GPUs are not the correct way to approach this problem. RTX is an approximation at best and a complete joke at worst. That said, I do believe ray tracing is the future and can become the standard way in which we engage with all 3D graphics concerns. Contrast the GPU with the newest generation of x86 CPUs. They have more cores than you can typically u…
I don't know the implementation details of this, but I use both a 3950x and a 2080 Ti for rendering in Blender's Cycles, which is a non-realtime path-traced engine. I've experimented with several different configurations, and the GPU using its raytracing cores is much faster than the CPU for identical results. Given that next-gen cards are expected to increase the number of these cores by 2x or 4x, I don't see how software raytracing could compete.
“Micropolygon” I assume means Reyes rendering, I.e that the polygons are created on demand from underlying geometry. Instead of various LODs you tessellate when rendering, specifically for the view so each pixel has ~1 vertex. Walk closer to the statue and it gets more triangles in tesselation.
But how is it running so quickly? I've seen adaptive rendering implementations before, but they couldn't run in real time. If they are really using billions of polys they can't store them all in VRAM. Is the PS5 SSD fast enough to recalculate polys for every model in the scene every frame (Or even every few frames)?
No details yet, but hopefully that will follow soon.
I don’t think the SSD but rather the GPU would be doing the tesselation...