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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

#51

Post by prawn »

jarin wrote: post #26
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...

I trust Carmack's response over pretty much anyone's in matters of rendering engines. The guy is a god of coding them.

I saw a comment on Reddit about this 6-7 hours ago suggesting that Carmack had a horse in this race and that we might be best to presume the very slightest of bias in his response(s).

That said, I also view his perspective in this field as tending towards unquestionable. He's always seemed to have had a pretty sparkling reputation as well as the obvious talent.

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

#52

Post by prawn »

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…

I think that's one of the massive challenges in gaming. I played Minecraft a bit (before realising I was tending a lovely in-game garden while there were weeds outside my real-life house) and at no point was my experience impacted negatively by the fact that the animals were dorky boxes with legs. Photo-realistic isn't everything.

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

#53

Post by bodigital »

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.

Cyril Crassin's stuff is also interesting and it's here, now, running dynamically on GPUs. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAsg_xNzhcQ

See his papers page: http://artis.imag.fr/Membres/Cyril.Crassin/

I am curious what methods Euclidean are using, however.

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

#54

Post by mestudent »

baddox wrote: post #46
jerf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"tl;dr: Dynamic shadows work fine." So... where were they in the video? There's a difference between "some voxel engines can have dynamic lighting" and "dynamic lighting works with this particular engine". It's not like this is some obscure or useless feature that nobody has ever heard of. In fact for all the "detail" one can't help but notice the number of other things missing from the video.

Obviously not every 3D rendering technique in existence would be included in a short demo video.

For something as obvious as for gaming (where in the video other games have people running around while these guys are hovering around a static environment), I expect something that at least looks like a game, hell id go for simple animation such as the top comments blade of grass.

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

#55

Post by AndrewMoffat »

palish wrote: post #19
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.

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

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

#56

Post by extension »

hristov wrote: post #5
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.

Also if they actually make a scene with different things in it. Having millions of objects in your scene is not that hard if they are all copies of the same object. The old demonstration showed a bunch of repeated copies of a single object. This one showed a lot of copies as well, although not as obvious.

It is hard in that you still have to draw every poly in every copy of the object. Instancing allows you to reuse some per-vertex calculations but it doesn't help at all with fragments, which is where most of the power is typically used.

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

#57

Post by unconed »

prawn wrote: post #51
jarin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust Carmack's response over pretty much anyone's in matters of rendering engines. The guy is a god of coding them.

I saw a comment on Reddit about this 6-7 hours ago suggesting that Carmack had a horse in this race and that we might be best to presume the very slightest of bias in his response(s). That said, I also view his perspective in this field as tending towards unquestionable. He's always seemed to have had a pretty sparkling reputation as well as the obvious talent.

The tech basically has to be a variant of sparse voxel octrees. Carmack has mentioned it in an interview years ago, It's reasonable to assume he's built his own prototype, as he does with pretty much anything else.

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

#58

Post by extension »

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.

Useless huh? Static geometry and lighting was the state of the art for a while, starting with Quake. It certainly puts some constraints on game mechanics but it's significantly better than useless.

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

#60

Post by nosignal »

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 least free up the "polygon budget" to improve the features which couldn't be voxel-based.

If anything you could create a pretty interesting art style with hyper-realistic backgrounds and cel-shaded characters, or similar. Even as a replacement for pre-rendered background scenery or out-of-level elements it would be useful.

And (thinking of the Game of Thrones titles story) whatever mojo they've got must surely be able to be applied to other industries, eg. CGI - if Weta or Pixar could improve the poly count of their static backdrops without just buying more rendering farms, that's gotta count for something.

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