GeForce3: Real-time RenderMan?

b0ris writes "This review of the NVIDIA GeForce3 at The Tech Report does a nice job explaining how the GF3 chip can create advanced graphics effects in real time. The author raises the prospect of having real-time Final Fantasy or Shrek-style animation on the desktop in a consumer graphics card. The examples from the GF3 he uses to back it up are almost convincing, even if it isn't quite there yet. Will render farms go the way of the dodo?" Well, I'm all for dreaming, but its gonna be a few years before the GeForce8 can do renderman in real time, but when we get there, Final Fantasy 21 is gonna rule.

Comments

Render Farms

[Anonymous Coward]

> Will render farms go the way of the dodo?

When a video card has the power of a render farm, then people will simply make a render farm using those cards.

This will always be the case, until the rendering abilities of a card become indistinguishable from reality, and can render twice as fast.



All your race are belong to Gus.

render != raytrace

[tolldog]

Most of what we see with "realistic rendering" on desktop boxes is OpenGL / direct3d based. This isn't realy rendering, well... its not raytraced.
Its true that they are getting close and blurring the line between rendering and desktop 3D for all practical purposes there is a difference.
I just hope rendering never goes away... I need this job!
Another difference is that game movement is not near as complex as cinematic animation. Most game movement is pre-definded movements trigered by something. A lot of secondary animation and even some primary animation is done by a complicated set of equations. It all depends on the package, but sometimes with these solvers on, you might get 1 fps when viewing the animation. Until issues like that are fixed, you will not be able to generate stuff like that on the fly.

Re:render != raytrace

[furiousgeorge]

>> This isn't realy rendering, well... its
>>not raytraced.

That makes zero sense.

'real' rendering is not raytracing. Raytracing is one type of approach for simulation light propagation. It's not the end-all and be-all. it has it's own serious problems.

Go see a movie. 99% of the CGI that you will see in feature films is done with PRMan (Pixars implementation of the Renderman standard). PRMan doesn't raytrace. Ever.

Raytracing has it's place. So do a lot of other approaches. Open your mind.......

Re:render != raytrace

[throx]

You got the subject right and then proceeded to throw it all away in the body of your article.

Rendering is not raytracing. Rendering (in terms of 3D) tends to be an all-encompassing term which covers the conversion of the model (ie bytes that describe a scene) into the image (ie bytes that depict a scene). Raytracing is simply one tool at the disposal of the rendering engine.

Raytracing isn't even the best you can do as it can't cater for atmospehric effects and diffusion of light through a scene.

A commercial renderer (LW, Maya, 3DSMax) will use a lot of different methods to generate the final scene. Some objects will used simple renders that you find on a Voodoo 1 chip, others will use complex ray traced algorithms that can't be done in 3d hardware yet.

The GF3 with it's pixel and vertex shaders is just one step closer to what Pixar and ILM managed to achieve in the 80s. The problem is that Pixar and ILM are just getting better and better every day. There is no way a GF3 would ever be able to produce something like Shrek in real time, and by the time a GF* does it will pale in comparison to what is coming out of the movie studios.

Many games now have some rather complex IK effects to get more realistic motion. The Halo engine produces some fairly impressive physical effects - look at the way the jeep drives sometime, it is quite realistic. Games have the distinct disadvantage to cinematic animation at this point - in the movie you know exactly what is going to happen and you can write special exceptions where needed, even altering the vertexes by hand if needed. In a game EVERYTHING has to be either anticipated, or computed in real time. No wonder things are still a little forced.

3D cards are getting there. Most can put out plenty of FPS when required (remember the cinima renders are only 24fps - below what most gamers consider even passable). It's really getting the polygon count up and the parallel processing power up now. Given that most 3D cores have MORE processing power than the CPU in your machine, it's hardly surprising that the processing load is steadily going from the CPU to the 3D card.

Who knows where the future is going, but I'll assure you that 3D engines are just going to get better and better, and movies are certainly going to improve to the point where you won't be able to tell an animated film from the real thing.

Not for years.!!!! Quote from pixar about Nvidia

[Vermifax]

What Pixar thinks of NVidia: The quote from the Nvidia's website:

Achieving Pixar-level animation in real-time has been an industry dream for years. With twice the performance of the GeForce 256 and per-pixel shading technology, the GeForce2 GTS is a major step toward achieving that goal.

-Jen-Hsun Huang, President of NVIDIA Corp.

Here is what Tom Duff from Pixar thinks about that:

These guys just have no idea what goes into `Pixar-level animation.' (That's not quite fair, their engineers do, they come and visit all the time. But their managers and marketing monkeys haven't a clue, or possibly just think that you don't.)

`Pixar-level animation' runs about 8 hundred thousand times slower than real-time on our renderfarm cpus. (I'm guessing. There's about 1000 cpus in the renderfarm and I guess we could produce all the frames in TS2 in about 50 days of renderfarm time. That comes to 1.2 million cpu hours for a 1.5 hour movie. That lags real time by a factor of 800,000.)

Do you really believe that their toy is a million times faster than one of the cpus on our Ultra Sparc servers? What's the chance that we wouldn't put one of these babies on every desk in the building? They cost a couple of hundred bucks, right? Why hasn't NVIDIA tried to give us a carton of these things? -- think of the publicity milage they could get out of it!

Don't forget that the scene descriptions of TS2 frames average between 500MB and 1GB. The data rate required to read the data in real time is at least 96Gb/sec. Think your AGP port can do that? Think again. 96 Gb/sec means that if they clock data in at 250 MHz, they need a bus 384 bits wide [this is typo. 384 _bytes_ wide!]. NBL!

At Moore's Law-like rates (a factor of 10 in 5 years), even if the hardware they have today is 80 times more powerful than what we use now, it will take them 20 years before they can do the frames we do today in real time. And 20 years from now, Pixar won't be even remotely interested in TS2-level images, and I'll be retired, sitting on the front porch and picking my banjo, laughing at the same press release, recycled by NVIDIA's heirs and assigns.

Vermifax

Let's see if I can beat...

[Shotgun]

everyone else to the punch.

Sarcasm mode on:
Will computers continue to get faster? Will we someday have lightbulbs in every room of the house? Will everyone who wants one be able to afford an automobile one day?

Well, it'll be a few years before we're able to play color video games on our personal computers, but when we do the arcade games will really rock!!
Sarcasm mode off:

Really? What kind of sensless 'wow-computers-are-getting-faster' is this? The article actually makes sense and is interesting. It explains how computers are getting faster. It's the silly, so-called 'editoralizing' that stoopid.

Lightwave 6 3D

[eric2hill]

I have a copy of Lightwave 3D and it supports OpenGL for realtime previews of animations. It uses its own internal renderer (or screamernet) to do the final rendering, but loading a scene in layout and hitting the realtime preview looks pretty neat on a GF2. I'd really like to see if some of the additional textures and lighting capabilities will be supported in LW6 in the future...

Re:FPS

[throx]

This is completely false. Nyquist doesn't apply to a synchronous transfer.

The electron gun scan rate is CONTROLLED by the video card, so the frame rate coming out of the card is constant. The RAMDAC accesses memory at a constant rate, determined entirely by this refresh rate. Frames are generated into the back buffer and flipped into the front buffer once the entire frame is generated.

Nothing is actually "sampled" in the chain from frame generation to displaying the image (unless we want to talk about pixels rather than frames).

This means you need 30fps generated by the card to get 30fps displayed on the screen - not the 120fps you are suggesting!!

Jobs showed it at MacWorld

[epeus]

The GeForce 3 demo at MacWorld was Luxo junior rendered in real time, so Pixar quality animation is possible, for a sufficiently early value of Pixar...

It's not just the rendering.

[Ryu2]

In realistic graphical simulations, rendering is only a small part of the equation. Most of what we perceive to be "unrealistic" lies in the modelling of animation and movement -- physical dynamics and interactions such as collisions, deformations, effectsm natural pheonomena like wind, human locomotion, etc. We never think of these things conciously, but perceptually, if anything is out of place, we immediately notice something's amiss.

Here, even the most advanced renderer won't help much if you're talking about real-time interactive stuff -- it is sitll raw CPU speed here...

Man power...

[ChristianBaekkelund]

1) Tom Duff sounds on the money with regards to the technical misconceptions...but an even bigger ever elusive problem: 2) "Pixar-level" animation in the end is not about polygon count, it's about COUNTLESS man-hours spent modelling, lighting, and animating....no card can ever replace that.

Re:Not for years.!!!! Quote from pixar about Nvidi

[Uberminky]

Or try something like this. As the Pixar dood mentioned, even if the card could *render* it in realtime, there's a whole lot more than just rendering. That pic there (my first, so don't expect much ;) takes several times longer just to PARSE than it does to render. And it's absolute crap compared to the crazy stuff Pixar does.

However, I'd say we ARE about advanced enough to do crap like this in realtime... ;) (No goat links, I swear!!)

However, there is some hope... I remember reading in a great book about 3D games (Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming) that raytrace-quality realtime games would be (according to the author's math) about 20 years away. Interestingly, that's exactly what the Pixar guy predicted, and that book was printed in 1996. My observations: today, Pixar does far more than simple raytracing. It's radiosity up the wazoo, for example (I assume ;). So to me, this suggests that ~20 years from when the book was published, we will be able to have realtime raytracing of 1996 quality. Still not too shabby. BUT. There are gazillions of optimizations you can make in realtime games that you can't make in raytracing. Here's how I see it: We can improve the algorithms a few powers of ten, efficiency-wise. (Don't say we can't, you'd be very wrong.) We can speed up our processors a few powers of ten. I think we're getting there faster than these guys are suggesting, just as long as we don't aim for the moving target of Today's Pixar Production$. (As he points out, there will never be a day when the realtime graphics are as good as the prerendered ones, simply because the big companies have the cash to throw at it to make it look better.) Anyawy. Sorry this was so long. Great stuff ahead, though. :)

Re:Not for years.!!!! Quote from pixar about Nvidi

[aardvarkjoe]

Well, I hve no doubt that they could render an orange tree in better than realtime.

After all, that orange tree would have taken years to grow.

Re:Like rain on your wedding day

[_ganja_]

Well this post is going to be off topic but it's something that I need to get off my chest. The meaning of the word ironic, especially by Americans, is complete crap. Take the title of your post, that is not one bit ironic its just unlucky. In fact if you listen to the song that you took the title from everything in the lyrics is just unlucky. E.g. "Like a traffic jam when you're already late" is not one bit ironic, it would only be ironic if you were a town planner and got caught in a traffic jam on your way to a meeting to discuss the traffic problem.

"10,000 spoons when all you want is a knife", how is that ironic? It would only be ironic if later you discovered that a spoon would have done just as well for say, opening a can of paint.

Gameplay, not graphics

[Junior J. Junior III]

I still play Ms. Pac Man, but I hardly ever play games from just five years ago.

Graphics are cool and all, but they're essentially just pornographic. Not in the sexual sense, but pretty graphics just sit there vacuously to amuse your eyes. As has been said long and loud, game developers should strive to focus at least as much on gameplay as they do on making their graphics cutting edge. Give the user an elegant interface, something fun to interact with, something new, and something challenging.

This will make the big brother MSN telescreens fly

[Billly Gates]

Big Brother Bill will be very happy. I will support the insoc-MSDN party by upgrading all the msn telescreens from Dell-compaq-IBM-HP-sun corporation and I can play some Big brother sponsered games with it. I know Dr. Gates will run pretty good with the new card after shooting all the 3d GPL virus's. A game of find that communist counter-revolutionary will go well too. I need to have the face of Goldstein oops I mean Linus memorized for this game.

Remember Freedom is slavery, war is piece, and Ignorance is strength!

Now I need to stop goofing around here on the slashdot insoc-msdn party news and go back to work studying the 11th edition of NewSpeak by MSN expedia. I keep hearing people here on slashdot speaking in oldspeak.

You people all need to learn how to excell(smart tag link to Microsoft office homepage)on what you do to learn and explore (smart tag link to internet explorer site)your newspeak party langauge. With free(link to how free you are with hailstorm/.net)enterprise and innovation to lead the market, great Microsoft can actively access(link to ms access)all the information we need. We need an active innovatorto actively explore, and actively leadthe market, and they ask that we all support the revoluton by your activation subscription.

See that wasn't hard. You need to all speak newsspeak and only use these adjectives innovation, lead, explore, access, active, word, excell. This will make thought crime impossible. less is better. For something double-pluss-un-innovative like linux you should not use the word bad or sucks. You all are required to use the following words above with the -un extension. If something is really innovative you need to put doublepluss innovative or really bad its doubleplus uninovative. Everything non Big brother is just plus uninnovative. So remember its not GNU-linux but doubleplussuninnovative gnu/linux. Now lets here you all respect big brother now and after my newspeak lesson I will play some video games and render linus doing a double-plus-un-innovative things to scare people so that Bill Gates can actively explore my record so that I can be considered loyal member who doesn't doublethink.

Do we really want realistic rendering in games?

[aussersterne]

It seems to me that we will never get to the point of realistic rendering in games because by the time one reaches pixar-level animation, there is so much art and detail going on before the rendering stage.

If we do get game companies trying to produce games with "realistically rendered" graphics, won't they need budgets of 100 million for each game to develop all of the data (detail, world, etc.) that the hardware will operate on? Then we'll be walking into the software store laying down $5,000 for a game instead of $50.

QED

[blair1q]

Is anyone working on a Quantum Electrodynamic model of raytracing? Diffraction gratings would be cool. It would improve other things. Like hair, thin films, etc.

--Blair

Like rain on your wedding day

[Salieri]

I think it's a little ironic that today we talk about bringing Shrek and Final Fantasy to the desktop when just yesterday a slew of 4's and 5's affirmed that, beneath raw power, there is art in computer graphics.

Believe me, there is a lot of artistic skill that goes into making animation like that, from storyboarding to complicated modeling and animating to directorial talent and writing ability.

Just because Avid-style editing has been brought to the desktop, doesn't mean what you see on iFilm is as good as what you see in theaters. Most of the time it isn't. It's all about the talent, not the tools.

Case in point: Robert Rodriguez, who scraped together only $7,000 to become one of Hollywood's hot young directors. For those who don't know about him, his latest film was the hit Spy Kids.