3DFX Motion Blur In Action

Mr.Tweak writes: "TweakTown has some "exclusive" pictures of 3DFX's new Motion Blur effects on a 3DFX Voodoo5 in Quake 3 Arena @ 1280x980, 4X FSAA and oh boy - it looks absolutely sensational and so futuristic! According to 3DFX, together the Voodoo5 5000's support of the FXT1(tm) and DXTC(TM) texture compression and textures as large as 2048 texels x 2048 texels, the T-Buffer(TM) can render 3d landscapes with unparalleled realism and with an impressive cinematic style which is Motion Blur. Their article quickly explains Motion Blur and has lots of pictures of the new feature which is currently unreleased by 3DFX, or should we now say nVidiaFX?"

Comments

Gah!

[Chris Johnson]

The effect is _still_ being demoed at _ten_ times the time duration it should be, just to make it obvious. If they don't get a clue they'll never figure out how to make it worth a damn- though frankly we're not likely ever to see this in the market now that nVidia controls the technology- I think they are going to suppress it and sue anyone else who tries to compete with them using the idea.

All they needed to do was use the T-Buffer in line with the way they use FSAA, and keep the last rendered frame to average with the current one. It'd only look (worse than) those awful screenshots at rotten framerates like 9fps, but as you went above 30fps it would start looking just like unblurred rendering _except_ that fast-moving detailed textures would be _softened_ dynamically. Combining that with 2X FSAA would be a fantastic effect with a great deal of 'you are thereness', but NOOOOO... can't these people check with other professionals other than just computer programmers? Ask any cinematographer if that's a normal cinematic level of photographic motion blur :P they'll look at you like you are _insane_. Almost nothing moves through the frame enough to produce _that_ much blur.

Exclusive? I Think Not.

[citizenc]

Interesting.. when says 'exclusive' he really means 'nobody else bothered to download the demo, which is freely available ALL OVER THE INTERNET'

From FilePlanet:

This is the early release of the stand alone Q3Test that does not require the game to play. The difference is 3dfx Interactive's motion blur technology implimented into the game. Those using Voodoo 3 and up based video cards will see a cool motion blur from 3dfx Interactive's T-buffer being used. It requires the use of 4sample Rotated-Grid Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing. This is not a patch but a stand alone demo of the early Quake 3 Test.

Download the demo here.

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CitizenC

tweaktown?

[plone]

Isn't it odd that the submitter of the story is also the owner of the website where the page is hosted? It seems to me as if it is a quick attempt to generate some banner ad revenue. Especially since screenshots of this sort have been around since the initial introduction of the T-buffer.

Re:Interreting, but...

[MikeTheYak]

Motion blur is antialiasing. Instead of in the spatial domain, as most people think of antialiasing, it's done in the time domain. A blurry monitor doesn't recreate the effect any more than a blurry monitor improves image quality by antialiasing edges of polygons.

Like the antialiasing that gets rid of jaggies, it can occasionally be a bad thing, but in general it's a good thing. At 9 fps, it's a bad thing; it's like rendering a picture at 1/4 resolution for the sake of removing jaggies. However, as hardware gets faster, and motion blur at 30fps becomes possible, it does improve the user experience. You don't really see the blurring, but the movement becomes smoother.

Is it really beneficial? Consider this. People start complaining about frame rates when they drop below 40fps or so for a first-person shooter (which I won't abbreviate to a TLA for obvious reasons). Movies, including the CG parts, are played at only 24fps, yet the motion looks smoother. This is because cameras naturally add motion blur (because of a finite shutter speed), and the folks who add CG elements take great pains to include motion blur effects.

This is unnatural..

[CBoy]

I prefer the NATURAL motion blur induced by a few good beers. :-)

Uh huh...

[Snowfox]

So this &ltfingerquote&gt motion blur technology &lt/fingerquote&gt involves a kind of smearing technique? Kind of like you'd get from taking photos of monitors?

Blur? This is new??

[seanmeister]

I've had these blur effects ever since the original Doom was released!

Oh wait, those are fingerprints on my monitor...

Sean