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 != 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

[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.

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

[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.