Slashdot Mirror
Final Fantasy At 2.5FPS
Rikardon writes: "Adding a little fuel to the ATi-vs-NVIDIA fire started earlier today on Slashdot, NVIDIA and Square are showing a demo at SIGGRAPH of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within being rendered in 'real time' (four-tenths of a second per frame) on a Quadro-based workstation. Now that I think of it, this should also inject new life into this debate." Defender2000 points to the Yahoo article. Update: 08/14 09:30 PM by T : Original headline was wrong, said ".4FPS" but as cxreg pointed out, .4 frame per second isn't .4 seconds per frame. Sorry.
Yeah, well, it doesn't take long to string clichés together....
-jKarma: T-rexcellent.
An acheivement is not always identical to the description of an acheivement. I was merely pointing out that the pictures didn't contradict the description like the parent poster asserted.
But then, he's an AC, i should really filter those out.
It'd still be smaller to download the actual movie as the original textures , audio samples, etc would take much, much, much more space. Especially if the movie is Divx4 compressed comapred to MPEG2.
Eh? I prefered Cowboy Beebop's script to The Matrix!
:-)
Hell, at even Digi Charat was more internally consistent!
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Rendering a movie at 320 x 240 or 640 x 480 is much easier than rendering it at the resolution and size of a movie theater's screen. If the Quadro was rendering the movie at 100 x 75 pixels, all this doesn't mean much.
*This page intentionally left pointless*
i was mildly surprised when i saw this for a couple reasons.
1. they actually were able to do it, this quickly
2. it was said that nvidia had no chance of ever being able to do something like this as it they weren't serious graphics cards.
this comes from an article several months ago on maximum pc (sorry i checked for the link but it's not to be found, but if a staff member from there reads this and they can find the link please link it) which was about a flame war that someone from nvidia and one of the guys from sgi (i might be wrong on sgi, sorry if i am and i forget the names, it's not cause i don't want to leave them out it's that i don't remember), where the guy from sgi said that nvidia was off his rocker with saying that nvidia cards could ever come near the level of performance to do something like toy story and it would be many years, tho the article is less than a year old.
well i guess the guy from sgi is eating crow now after reading what the nvidia cards are doing what they said would take years till bill gates becomes a linux lover in less than a year and right now i don't think that bill has really embraced the penguin quite yet.
it was just an interesting side note to this story.
-
Update: 08/14 08:39 PM by T:Original headline was wrong, said ".4FPS" but as cxreg pointed out,
.4 frame per second isn't 4FPS. Oops.
Shouldn't that read ".4FPS doesn't equal 4/10 a second per frame"?"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
Typically, I believe a movie has a framerate of 24 FPS. Therefore, 1 sec / 24 frames = 0.04166 SPF. Right?
From the text it seems that you meant 2.5 FPS (or possibly .4spf? although who would want a sunscreen like that?)
rate: 0.4 frame per second count: 2.5 frames each sec rendered but playback obviously isn't 1 FPS. I believe movies are typically recorded at 24 FPS So it takes approx 9.6 seconds for each second of animation when rendering at 0.4 frames per second.
0.4sec/Frame rendering is more powerful than Excel has EVER had. This is the first time I've a convincing argument in favor of Quattro based systems.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
14 people chimed in to say that FPS != SPF. Where are the moderators when you need them?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
And modern cards can't do blur, depth of field, etc. etc.???
However i suspect (although i am not certain) that Ed Avis's point was that watching a 100fps rendered-in-realtime line-removal wireframe-only (with the wireframes colored based on a stripped-down version of the shading algorhythm) version of FF:TSW would be really fucking cool. I mean, if i wanted to see FF:TSW, i'd go to the theater. But if i went to siggraph, i'd want to see something i haven't seen. I'd want to see ff:tsw specially rendered in such a way that all skin textures were replaced with astroturf.
C'mon, square, where's your creativity? You can render the thing in realtime, yeh, and it's maybe among the most impressive demonstrations ever committed by a human-- but you could do so much more. WHy not set up a booth like that, but with an interactive console such that the spectators can replace certain predetermined aspects of the movie with values that make no sense?I mean, just think of the possibilities of something like that! Replace the old guy with a model of Sonic the Hedgehog. Continuously render all of the members of alec baldwin's team wearing NVIDIA t-shirts, or (yum) in skimpy bathing suits. Screw with the viscosity values in the renderer such that aki's hair always acts as if it is in zero-g. Or take out all the backgrounds and use the extra processing power to render all the characters with waist-length hair. I mean, just think. 30 minutes of work by the renderer programmers, and that would be the coolest demo EVER!!!
that being said, i too am boggling at nvidia. How long until we're playing FPSes with Aki-quality hair on the characters?
OK, really, I have nothing terribly socially relevant or interesting to say. However, in summary:
d00d!!
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I think the point was to show that real time animation of the quality presented in the FF Movie is almost at hand.
I had a friend in the early 90's in the computer animation field who was wowed when his first 486 with an astounding 8mb of RAM could render a full frame of a 640x480 scene in under an hour or so. So I can imagine that wherever he is now, he's happier than can be.
And yeah, if they wanted to demo some huge frame rate, they could dump the textures to a lower quality..but then it wouldnt be all that impressive now, would it?
So, yippee, it can render fast...too bad that has NO BEARING on the actual quality of the production (with the possible exception of the team gets to iterate on the work a little more).
Which is it? A frame roughly every two seconds (.4 FPS) or roughly two frames each second (.4 SPF)?
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Heh, sort of reminds me of the bad old days when AMD would quote system cpomparisons using twice as much RAM as the Intel system, to artificially inflate their scores.
I presume you're talking about when AMD was still running K6 (classic) and Intel had just come out with the PII. AMD generally ran two comparision charts: one with the systems configured similarly (just swap out 200MHz PII with 200MHz K6) and one with the systems configured for the same price. The idea was "Look, we're pretty close clock-for-clock, but if you buy our stuff, you have enough money to really boost the performance." Neither benchmark is more valid than the other, so they ran both.
Uh, as far as I know, these movies are still shown from FILM, which has microscopic resolutions. What the resolution was when transferring to film, which is MUCH smaller than a monitor, is what would be interesting to know...
will this improve the plot?
The FF render times sound about the same as numbers I heard from Pixar about Toy Story. What was that post a couple weeks ago, about the machine you want always costing $5000? Well, the frame you want to render will always take 90 minutes.
Although people seem to be quoting massive resolutions for digital image to film transfer, in most of the theaters I've visited (even the good ones) you would not be able to take advantage of resolutions like that. I'm guessing that due to inperpections in the screen shape and curviture, the picture is focused for optimum coverage which can be quite out of focas. Anyway the digital cinema standard is only 1280x1024. Check out the The Barco website for more info.
it's the end of the world! Duck and cover! Get a life!
Yep, very true. Also, I think that a lot of people aren't considering that even though frames might have taken 90 min. on an SGI the entire frame is not rendered all at once. I don't know for sure if the 90 min. refers to the entire frame, but I doubt it. There are layers upon layer for backgrounds, main characters, the ghost alien phantom things, shadow passes, reflection passes, caustic passes (in rare cases) and on and on.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
...downloading the Final Fantasy movie, or just the models used to create it?
Last post!
I can rephrase "DVD quality" to "looks as good as DVD", if it will help you understand. I'm sure eveyone knew what I meant.
.4s/frame = 1/.4s/frame = 2.5 fps
Anyhoo, that's good enuf for 3D. Let's start getting a stinkerator peripheral to produce smells.
Imagine the 3D artificial pr0n. The API code would look something like this:
BOOL rc;
rc = ProduceFemaleCrotchStink(NUM_DAYS_PERCOLATION);
(or, for men, NUM_YEARS_PERCOLATION).
It's called Blinn's Law (after Jim Blinn). The artist will increase complexity of the scene to negate any speed improvement due to upgraded hardware [wait time is constant]
Upon inspecting the page you refered to, it would appear that the models are not, as you said, textureless. If that page is to be beleived, they have acheived exactly what they claim to have acheived, and more power to them.
Can be found at http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=final_fantasy
The article (on yahoo) is pretty exagerated and sensationalistic, but the images are still very impressive, even they are about what you would expect at 2.5 FPS with such a powerful card. I think it is a pretty good indication of what the next generation of console games (after gamecube and x-box) will look like.
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Wouldn't you get a sunburn if you only used .4 SPF?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Mod this sucker way down into oblivion!!
1 frame
.4 seconds
----------- = 2.5fps
or if we're using something closer to your math...
2 frames taking 8/10 of a second, with 2/10 left over.
Each frame takes 4/10 sec to render. 2/10 = x * 4/10. x = 1/2
2 1/2 = 2.5fps
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I see this a lot, and I feel a need to correct it in hopes that the correction meme will spread beyond this page and infect at least a few people. So here goes.
You say that Intel is 100% X86 and AMD is 99.9% compatible. You state it as if obvious, and it sure _sounds_ obvious, but any meaning that can be attached to that statement is either false or irrelevant.
The x86 architecture is documented in technical manuals published by Intel. Actually, I'm going to specify the "ia32 architecture" and thus ignore anything before the 386. Anyway, these manuals detail what the processor is going to do when fed certain instructions. Assemblers are written to these documentations.
The first thing you have to realize is that each Intel processor has a different technical manual, because there are instructions added with every major revision. So if we take any given Intel CPU model (say, an i80386DX), and compare it to any other processor model (Pentium II), we can say with certainty that they are not 100% compatible. The Pentium II will react differently if given certain instructions; for example, it will process MMX instructions instead of objecting to them. You could not say these processors are 100% compatible and retain any meaning in "100%".
Secondly, there are bugs. No Intel chip matches the specifications perfectly, and so every chip would be slightly under 100% compatible even with its own manual. (Yes, you hear about very few bugs, but there are many more that aren't really very important that you can read about on Intel's site if you want).
Now we can say that AMD chips are no different from different Intel chips. Some AMD chips have capabilities like 3dnow! that an i80386DX does not have (and this is admitted by the chip in its processor flags). But that's no different from a Pentium II having MMX. And AMD chips have bugs also, but there's no evidence to show that AMD chips have more bugs or anything.
Intel chips are not "100% X86 compatible" just because Intel makes them. That's like saying that Windows NT is 100% MS-DOS compatible just because Microsoft made it and can define what MS-DOS is. Even Microsoft will admit that certain applications which will run under MS-DOS will not run on Windows NT.
And just as an aside, there are no undocumented instructions of even the most remote practical significance in Intel chips. Undocumented instructions are ignored by assembler and compiler developers.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I still read newsgroups :) and while there's not much about Siggraph 2001 on c.g.r.renderman
at the moment, there's some stuff about the GS cube - if the RenderMan users bother about this FF demo at all, I suspect they won't be impressed. Vermifax's /. post (#44) Score 5 Interesting makes the point well, plus it has the Tom Duff quote.
,While it is impressive to see the movie rendered in real-time (with adjustable lighting sources and shadows and reflections) it really doesn't look as good as the movie did. I'm at siggraph now (just saw the demo five minutes ago) and the interactive polygon rendering techniques just can't match the radiosity/raytracing used for professional moves - its getting close though!
Maybe they should shut down for a few days and send the "editors" to a basic high school english course. You think?
Stupidity never felt so good.
"but as cxreg pointed out, .4 frame per second isn't .4FPS. Oops."
Actually, .4 frames per second IS .4FPS (FPS stands for Frames Per Second, heh)
I think what you might have meant is that .4 seconds per frame isn't .4FPS..
Isn't this supposed to be a geek site?
60 frames per second divided by .4 (frames per second) = 150. If we oversimplify and apply Moore's law to the speed of 3D processors, we will halve this every 18 months.
As I see it, we are about 7 - 8 years away from this kind of rendering in real time.
Thoughts? Comments? Complaints?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Yes we r tht bored. How bout some more informative posts then.
For those of you that couldn't attend the demo personally, there are some pictures (small ones) at the Nvidia Website. Here is the link. Quite frankly I think it's simply incredible that they could render the movie in realtime at any resolution or framerate. As you can see from the pictures, the character still look pretty damn good. Bravo Nvidia!
Ahhhh, the first rational comment I have seen yet on this topic. Also, where are their pictures? I find it odd that there are no shots of the render yet.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
- Size of rendered frames. What resolution was NVIDIA rendering out, maybe 640x480? 1024x768? FF was probably rendered out at 1880x1024 (about 2-3 times the number of pixels as compared to 1024x768) if not more.
- How did they have to massage the data before passing it to the rendering pipeline? I hear FF was rendered with Renderman
... are they claiming they can render RIB files through the Quadra chipset? If not, how much time does it take to convert/cook the data? If so, then ... wow
- How good did it look in the end? Were all the elements rendered properly, and does it really look anywhere near as good as the movie we saw in the theatre?
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see this kind of technology coming, I can totally see this replacing, or at least complementing, our Linux render farm at some point in the future. But it sure would be nice if we had some usefull technical details to qualify this 90 mins verses--M
Film and processing for a movie can cost 1 - 3 million dollars. For Episode II it was estimated that Lucas would save 3 million dollars by going to film. But of course the real advantage is effects being done while the production is still going.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Quake III can already be rendered in the resolution that DVD specifies. DVD quality is resolution and compression. You have no idea what you are talking about, please shut the fuck up.
I hope you at least snuck into the theater?
If not, demand your money back.
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
No it isn't. But it is .4FPS! :)
Are you drinking, Timothy?
Disclaimer: I am... (drinking :-))
karma capped
Lightwave, DivX, HDTV resolutions? Oh. Hell. Yes. I only wish my computer could play back all that DivX goodness.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I read this as 2.5 frames per second. Or about 1/10 the frame rate you see when you go to the theatre. I wonder if this is an average for the whole film, surely it must vary somewhat from frame to frame. I'm curious...so they render it in real time, but what about the physics and such? Precalculated, or did they do all that on the fly as well? No matter how you slice it, this is some amazing stuff.
And I thought the movie was slow at the theatres.
It doesn't actually take 90 minutes per frame to render. That is if the rendering was done on a single CPU. Square used a massive renderfarm so each frame took a variable amount of time based on the complexity of the rendered image and the fraction of the farm dedicated to that particular render operation. That's why you see things like "Final Fantasy took 1 million years to render" or whatever when you know it isn't exactly true. Look at ArsTechnica where they did an interview with some people from Square about the rendering process. I think there was even a slashdot article about it.
And yes, it's a little rediculous for NVidia to suggest that their card is 100k times faster than Square's rendering hardware for FF-TSW. But what's more rediculous is that yahoo took that statement and printed it in its article with no explanation of exactly what NVidia means when they say that.
I'm the original submitter. Just to vindicate my otherwise-good name:
.4fps. In fact, if you actually READ THE BODY of the submission, you'll notice that the rendering speed was SPELLED OUT (four-tenths of a second per frame) so people wouldn't get it wrong. The original Slashdot headline (which read .4fps) was the editor's modification and bad math, not mine.
:)
My suggested headline was "FF:TSW rendered in real time on NVIDIA Quadro."
I said nothing in the headline about
Just to clear that up.
. . . I kind of think
Just kidding, of course. :-)
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Remember? Real time doesn't mean 60 fps or "CLICK->DONE!"
.4 sec, so that IS real time.
Real time means that they can predict with 100% accuracy how long a given operation will take to complete. In this case, they say that they can render each frame in
The user could interact with the movie and affect the animation in real time. Or, to put that in perspective, imagine fragging your office mates in a photo-realistic Quake VIII. :)
Update: 08/14 08:39 PM by T:Original headline was wrong, said ".4FPS" but as cxreg pointed out, .4 frame per second isn't .4FPS. Oops.
Uh, .4 frames per second IS .4FPS. I think you mean that .4 seconds per frame isn't .4 frames per second.
This isn't that hard guys.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Only the very bottom picture of Cid (not Sid) shows real texturemapping on the face. The top picture looks gourad shaded as well as the others. Because of the close up, I am assuming that in this demo, there are multiple parts. This one happened to be a close-up of his face. Which is much more detailed then the rest of the screenshots. Its not really that hard to render a side of a face that isn't really moving like the rest of the demo was.
> Update: 08/14 08:39 PM by T:Original headline was wrong, said ".4FPS" but as cxreg pointed .4 frame per second isn't .4FPS. Oops.
.4 frames per second IS .4 FPS. What you meant was 0.4 seconds per FRAME is not 0.4 FPS.
> out,
YES IT IS!
Why don't they just render it in wireframe and get 100fps? With hidden line removal it would still be entirely watchable.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
.4FPS is NOT the same as "Four-tenths of a second per frame" which is it?
And all this time the doctors told me an SPF of at least 15 was the best ;)
It's crap like this why the US population can't handle the SI unit system, not to mention their own gringo unit system.
This is the same reason why hot dogs are sold in packages of twelve and buns in packages of eight.
Not only that, but holy bejeezus, there isn't a single link to the pertinent information in the submitter's italicized text. Timothy had to pull the story link out of some other submission. Come on people, I don't care about your freaking thread on Slashdot in the last 8 articles that mentioned Nvidia or SIGGRAPH or Squaresoft, I want to see the story.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Oh, I see.
So what you're saying is that the lens assembly of the projector will degrade the 3x2 image recorded onto the film until it magically becomes 16x9 ratio despite the actual ratio it is projected at being 2.35:1 (21x9).
Presumably the same mystical process happens in reverse while the images are filmed.
Do they make these lenses out of the sort of glass you get in bathroom windows then or are they constructed from pure bullshit like your post?
Well, what someone claims to achieved is pretty much the same as what they say they did, you aren't saying very much here.
Although, it seems that the '=' relation has been in doubt lately..
Doubly so when you realize that while CPUs have been picking up pace according to the seemingly speedy Moore's Law, graphic accelerators have been picking up pace at Moore's Law cubed.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
2.5 FPS == 4/10 of a second per frame
Interesting article I thought, so I look at the comments, and 90% of them are people correcting the title of the article..
I think after the first or second post we get it, the title is not perfect, but im a bit confused, as I think many of us have seen an incorrect title of an article before, so its been known to happen. Reading crap about 4fps is this and that, who gives a rats ass, it was a typo, get over it..
Zeno
As I pointed out previously, NVidia's "Quadro" and "GeForce" lines are actually the same hardware. GeForce 2 boards can be "converted" to Quadro 2 boards with a jumper.
The GeForce 3 and "Quadro DCC" boards both use the NVidia NV20 chip, have the same driver, and appear to be very similar if not identical. It's hard to find differences in the feature set. Only ELSA (which is basically a unit of NVidia) sells the Quadro DCC, and apparently only through 3DS Max dealers, along with a special 3DS MAX driver. It's more of a private label than a real product line at this point.
From the: Who-needs-a-woman-when-you-have-a-video-card dept.
.4 (dipstick)
Ok, quick Geek Test: If, upon reading this news post (despite the ditzy title), you did not instantly gasp, shiver, or become aroused, you are NOT a geek. Period.
Which sort of answers my question to my friend after we watched FF for the first time. Is this the top of our abilities in CG? Or was it a matter of the producers saying, "Um...no. We can do a LOT better, but we'd have to wait 100 years for it to build/animate/render instead of 2, so we cut it down to size."
If that is the case, then it's just a matter of BBF (Bigger, Better, Faster (tm)) in terms of hardware before we see something twice as good as FF. Otherwise, if this is the height of skill we have, then we're talking development of new technologies and methods of doing this sort of detail before we see something else come out.
I'm no graphics expert, so maybe someone can answer that question for me. At any rate, the movie still made me shiver. Now I can watch it on my desktop...at 2.5fps, not
Blog,Twitter
So you watched it in fast forward or something? (noting that film standard is 24 fps in theaters)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Shit, that's faster than Project Eden runs on my P3-750/3DProphet Kyro 2 4500 64MB/256MB RAM!
Weird, Project Eden doesn't look as good as that movie, either...
;P
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Actually to nitpick, 29.97 fps is "real time". 30 fps would give you drop outs/suttering :)
*goes back to lurking*
35mm color negative stock is roughly 50/foot. Processing, including workprints, cleaning, video dailies, etc., about the same. So $1/foot. Figure 100 ft/minute (actually, running time is minutes=footage/93.48, but close enough) that's 9000 feet of film for 1.5 hr feature. Of course, you shoot a lot more than you use; 5:1 isn't unheard-of, but let's be generous and say 10:1.
That's $90,000 for a feature's worth of 35mm stock and processing, without being stingy. To lend some perspective: Renting the camera body alone is about $600/day, not including lenses, magazines, batteries, tripod, heads,and about $1000/day worth of other shit. For a five-week shoot that's $50,000 just to be able to use the film.
Five weeks feeding a cast & crew of 50 is almost $20,000 not including craft service (snack table -- believe me, it's not a luxury.)
Point is, if the difference between $500,000 and $600,000 is all that's keeping you from making your movie, you're a lot better off raising that difference than trying to save money by shooting DV. Hell, you're better off shooting 16mm -- if you're being cheap all around, your sets & lighting aren't exactly going to benefit from 35's higher resolution.
The effective resolution is dependant on the physical film itself which is NOT 16x9 ratio.
Mod this guy up. He's right.
People's response to this, like most other topics, allways seems to come from whatever deep rooted belief they think will come true, or want to come true. Not to mention the hundreds of comments that get posted about misspellings and typoes while they're all missing the point entirely.
The point of the article is to consider the progress being made in digital animation. You should know by now to never say never, especially if you're in the tech field. Why do you think that consumer graphics boards will never be able to produce something that looks as good as Final Fantasy:TSWI? Remember the old famous line "You'll never need more then 640k of RAM"? Yeah, I know, he never said it, but it proves the point. The box in front of me is stocked with 768M and it's been only what... 20 years? Go back and read this article. Then rethink it in terms of graphics technology. We're going to get, it's just a question of how long it will take.
If all you have to do all day is rant about spelling mistake and prove you are the master authority on FPS then that's fine with me. I'll be dreaming about the day I can get a graphics board that will put a real-time rendered Aki on my desktop doing aerobics.
Omega9
$chown us base
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
I think its pretty cool what technology can do in this day and age. Now if we can only get videogames that look like the movie.
Yes, I'd forgotten that nobody ever makes arithmetic mistakes outside of the US. Thanks for pointing it out.
were they just rendering it on a 21 inch screen or rendering it at what must be the fantastic resolution needed to get it to look right on a giant movie screen?
Photos.
I should have gone into greater depth. There are two major methods of flipping the standard 3:2 35mm frame to a wide aspect ratio.
The first is called a matte whereby the top and bottom of the film are simply not used.
The second method involves using an anamorphic lens which stretches the image vertically to fill the full frame. In the theaters, another lense is used to do the reverse.
There is actually a third method which is used by a few high profile directors involving a lens which projects onto the sound strip area of the frame in conjunction with a matte, but I won't go into that.
Anyhow, a great site which explains most of this stuff is http://www.hometheaterforum.com/home/wsfaq.html.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Mostly because of motion blurring. 24 fps on a computer is practically a slideshow.
Although Real Time is a vague definition, Its safe to say that a frame every 4/10s of a second equals 2.5 frames a second. No where near 30 frames a sec, which is the classical notion of "Real Time". Not to be a nit pick but if I claimed that I was doing work at real time speeds and was in fact 2.5 fps, I'd be laughed out of Computer Science circles forever. Also .4 Frames a sec???? is the real headline? Thats even worse(1 Frame per 2.5 secs!) so I think the "real time" claim is very bogus and should be withdrawn regardless of the correction.
...In other news, Slashdot proofreader their fires.
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=final_fantasy
Has anyone pointed out that .4 FPS != 4 seconds per frame? I can't believe that nobody noticed that error! I must be a genius to notice that! All this time, I thought that Slashdot had educated, bright readers - I guess not!
- Square has tie-ins to Sony (exclusivity clause of Final Fantasies on the PS1, rights to publish the movie).
- Microsoft has tie-ins to nVidia (nVidia makes some of the chips for the XBox).
-Square now has tie-ins to nVidia with this demonstration.
Does this mean that more Square games will get ported to the nVidia chipsets, most notably Final Fantasy for the XBox? If I had a choice between the relative hardwares (rather than my PC, which would come first) I'd love to see what Square could do with an nVidia chipset.
Shouldn't it be .4 seconds per frame instead of 2.5 frames per second?
Besides, any "realtime" demo can't show off all the hard work involving texturing and lighting that animators put into it. "Pixar quality animation" isn't what it is because of computers. Its due to the people who are using the computers.
I saw the demo and people playing with it. I can tell you the resultion is not 640x480, more in the order of at least 1024x768, probably more, I only scanned the exhibition for the last 3 hours.
Not as far as you might think. Actually, it's about 100 feet down the hall from where I'm sitting right now.
Consider the resolution. Images rendered for film are typically done at about 3000 x 2000
The final product is about half that. Resolutions up to 4k x 3k are used for intermediate special-effects editing. Digital cinema will be operating about HDTV resolutions.
we're left with another problem: you can't record VGA signals on film.
With digital cinema, it's (roughly speaking) VGA in - so you could sit in the theater watching what's being generated at that moment. For film, it's not that big a deal to replace the VGA out with a connector to a real-time film recorder (remember the hall I mentioned above? go to the other side of the hall).
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Now is it actually doing all of the rendering? or is there a bunch of PRECALCULATED information? Remeber compiling a Quake 2 Map. It was pre compiled to get the shading and lighting done beforehand so that it could be 'played back' in realtime. I suspect something similar is going on here. If it's really 'realtime' then they should be able to move things around and change stuff, not just re-render a movie. Nothing mind-blowing here.
Umm... actually they're both sold in packages of 8 now. It's now just an embarrassing bit of our history.
Lucasfilm's Sony camera, on which they have filmed Episode II, and which was considered to completely supercede analog film, picks up 1920x1080 resolution. You don't really need that much resolution to look fantastically better than what passes for film these days.
IGN has this article with more information, including a review, trailers, and some serious footage.
Are YOU listed?
Great, just great. I don't normally nitpick article goofs like this, but this is just shamefully amateurish and unprofessional.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Most rediculous of all is that you don't know how to spell rIdiculous... retard
What res? Film is usually somewhere well above anything a GForce can touch. 640x480 != 2048x1152 (or higher for Super 70 mm).
Also, 2.5 FPS isn't "real time". 24 fps film is "real time". 30 fps on video is "real time".
HOWEVER, this would be incredibly useful for generating dalies; spot render checks; web-based trailers and streaming video; Television-quality animation; etc.
Now you can PROVE to a director that a plot sucks, even in final form, and no all the whiz-bang graphics don't help!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think what you meant is that 2.5 FPS isn't considered fast enough to trick you into seeing motion. Minumum is 12FPS.
So it is real time, but the FPS just isn't fast enough to trick your brain into thinking that it is real motion.
Q: If .4 frame per second != .4FPS what does?
.4 Foolish Postings at Slashdot
A:
Yes.
I fucked up. And slashdot is making me wait 20 seconds to reply. And now another 2 minutes to post. God damn it, I love bad perl.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
This is
You're welcome
I have just got into 3D animation and it made me see 3D in a whole new light... I am current learning 3D MAX and while its not as good as maya it's still one of the best 3D programs to learn.... I have found that usual renders take around 5 minutes per frame... 5 minutes! that's without textures or anything... now if Square and NVidea can pull off the quality of CG in the FFMovie in real time then it will definitely put ATI into their corner crying. NVidea have always been one step ahead in the graphic world and with a team up with Square noone can stop them. Well maybe ATI should think about teaming up with Namco or something.
Just think, in the future, CG and computer technologies will have advanced to the point of creating fully autonomous and sentient creatures who look 100 percent like humans, and have the ability to adapt to play any role that is required for movies. They will have specially designed "movie personalities" to help them do this. Since they will only be in movies, not much attention will be paid to other personality subroutines and off screen they will be shallow and impersonable.
Unfortunately, they will be extremely expensive, and will require several million dollars per movie to operate. This will result in entire industries popping up in the areas where they make movies to support these automatons.
These constructs will be designed to be much more physically attractive that is humanly possible, and will be able to achieve freakish proportions in various parts of their bodies. They will be extremely popular to acquire images of from the internet.
Along with these new "movie drones" as they will be called, will come the technology to render fully realistic scences directly onto the medium of choice for making movies.
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
"4/10s of a frame per second means you can do just over 2 frames per second."
Wouldn't it be 4/10s of a second per frame means you can do just over 2 frames per second?
Not only did they achieve exactly what they say, but the guy operating the demo was cranking the level and bump mapping and skin detail up and down on the fly...
Aki just doesn't look as old as Donald Sutherland...
Hell of a demo... And right next to it, they were showing a 6 processor Real-Time Shading Library demo (a real-time subset of Renderman)...
I find that non-US persons are more familiar with unit systems. Even though I'm an American (chemical) engineer, few of my friends would know what FPS means. They might have a guess at SPF since sunblock is commonly advertised on TV. If only computer hardware was more actively advertised....
My
Carpe Noctem -=- Seize The Night
2048 seems to pretty much be standard. Some people do shots in 4096. Toy Story was at a lower resolution, something like 1400 pixels across.
To render it on a quadro, I'd imagine that they would also have to cut texture resolutions, but that article just didn't say enough about what happened to be usefull.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
We're geeks -- what do you expect???
I think if they are going for image quality they will probably concentrate on terms that actually mean something other than diffraction (diffusion + refraction?) and interference.
The "bosses" (as it were) of slashdot really need to get everyone together and figure out a solution to the "endless fuck-ups are us" brigade. The problems seem to be endless. I really would like to just see a whole day go by where they don't fuck something up so badly that it HAD to be intentional. I mean, we've seen this article corrected TWICE and it is STILL WRONG! What the fuck does it take to get them to think? Clue by 4, me thinks.
Stupidity never felt so good.
Since slashdot has now disproved the reflexive property of equality (A == A), we can now deductively proove any random assertation that pops into our minds.
Yeah. After all, we wouldn't want to hold the slashdot "editors" accountable for their mistakes now would we? After all, it would be terrible if they started doing things the right way. Slashdot would disappear from the lack of mistake flames.
Stupidity never felt so good.
So that gets us about 2.2 frames per second. Impressive.
A full second of video (24 FPS) would take 11 seconds to render.
1440 frames for a minute of film.
152640 frames in the whole movie.
6360 seconds of video in the movie.
69960 seconds to render the movie, which means that to watch it rendered in realtime (not really), it'd run for about 1166 minutes, or about 19.4 hours.
My math may be wrong, but that's not bad. Of course, one may want to claw their eyes out after sitting that long...
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=final_fantasy Notice the picture of the girl is virtually textureless. No moles or skin blemishes like in the movie. Also they say the "Technology Demo" runs fast while the movie ran 90 minutes per frame. It does not say they rendered the actual movie at that speed.
Why yes, it is amazing that it can render at .4 fps. That is quite a feat of silicon and software. I didn't read your post but I assume that's what you're talking about!
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
However, it is not
A most intriguing study of slashdot responders.
Heh, if you think I'm going to the beach with .4 SPF sunscreen on, you're out of your mind!
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
About as good as you do grammar.
Amazingly the digital movie format is 640x480. If you ever go to a digital movie, look at the edges and you can see the jaggys where the screen ends, if you're watching on a taurus screen.
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Notice how the official "press release" doesn't state the resolution it was rendered at? What's the movie resolution? Several thousand by Several thousand I imagine. Does doing it a 640x480 or LOWER mean the same thing? I have a hard time believing that a Quadro Setup can render something in .4 of a sec that their SGI setup takes 90mins to do. If Nvidia WAS INDEED 100,000 times faster at this using a Quadro setup, we might have heard of this before?
Something's missing from this methinks.
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I just watched the movie on my computer at 60 FPS. Fuck off, MPAA!
and believe me, there's no way nvidia's chip came anywhere remotely close to that of the movie.
Until their chip can produce a single frame that matches the image quality, they're still just making toys for quake fiends. Diffraction, interference, antialiasing...just a few of the photorealistic rendering staples, and nvidia has only recently been able to do antialiasing. They've got a long, long way to go before we're going to see actual movies rendered using their hardware.
Correct, Pixar's Photorealistic RenderMan is not a raytracer. It's a Scanline renderer. So much faster, and you can cheat all the effects you want. -Technical Director @ DI
0.4 Seconds Per Frame means 2.5 Frames Per Second (FPS)
.4 frame per second is .4 FPS. It's a frame every .4 seconds that isn't .4 FPS. Your correction is correct, but your explanation of the correction isn't.
Moron.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Damn, get it right people! "Realtime" means the computer is outputing the video at the same time as it is rendering, it does NOT mean 24fps. It basically means that it hasnt been pre-rendered.
1. Antialiasing
2. Resolution
3. Motionblur
4. CatmullClarc Subdiv surfaces
5. Color correction
6. MASSIVE TEXTURE SIZES
7. Extreme number of hairs.
8. Displacement shaders
9. Texture Shaders
10. light shaders
11. Displacement of all genetic geometry at once.
ie every object has different xyz values for every vertex in every frame.
I seriusly dont that this DEMO does that.
Untill you get prman to run on your
gfx card this kind of thing means shit.
Not system has enogh bandwidth to plaback
a movie in even preview mode.
You need to render it first.
The movements of the digital actors was done using Motion Capture. The motion capture process is the same that they use for video games. Remember the Marshal Falk football commercials for 989 sports? Same technology.
...ATI makes the worse drivers in the known universe.
take it to e2, where that kind of crap gets you a ching! and 10 karma. (sorry -- xp, "experience.").
Stupidity never felt so gross -- yet strangely compelling.
Does this mean there's a nap site somewhere where I can download Aki herself and not some comatose Window$ screensaver? But this isn't the Aki I fell in love with.
Jesus! We do math good at slashdot.
4/10s of a frame per second means you can do just over 2 frames per second.
God damn. People go to college and come out knowing this much about math?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You forgot to take into account the altitude of the movie project. The projector will experience a weaker gravitational field and therefore time will go faster for the projector than for the audience. .4 * 6.25 = 2.5. Easy, isn't it ?
With a little quantum mechanics and chaos, you end up with a factor of 6.25, which justifies the different frame rates since
Marko No. 5
So it renders to a computer screen at 2.5 FPS. That's nice and all, but a long way from film-making.
Consider the resolution. Images rendered for film are typically done at about 3000 x 2000 (give or take depending on aspect ratio, etc). Now, even assuming we could gang up 16 or 25 or whatever of these nvidia boards, we're left with another problem: you can't record VGA signals on film. All the hardware shortcuts and special-purpose circuitry in the latest video card are useless when it comes to final render for film, because they're not built into the gadget (and there are several different sorts) that's actually bombarding the emulsion with photons. (Typically some sort of three-pass (R,G,B) laser scanner).
Yes, it'll make for wonderful computer games (if you like that sort of thing) and maybe even some interesting experiments in real-time porno animation, but it doesn't do much for the film industry, nor would it at 10 times the speed (24 FPS is typical movie framerate). It'd have to be about 250 times faster for full framerate, full resolution images. About 12 years at Moore's Law rates. (Althogh I suspect at that resolution the flaws in the rendering and physics would become very distracting.)
(Actually, it helps the film production process, where animators can preview their work that much quicker. Faster graphics is always good, just let's not get carried away with the hype.)
-- Alastair
Generally considered to supercede analog film? Please. 2K resolution is really just marginally passable. High quality work is generally done at 4K with some even at 8K, which is what it really takes to match 35mm at its best.
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And you thought Moore's Law didn't apply to Graphics.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
by... who... where is your math....
Has the whole world gone mad?
a new class of people emerged... the innumerates...
Good god. Are you all that bored that we have to post about the same thing over and over and over and over and over ....
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
.4 FPS != 4/10 second per frame.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I wonder what 3dfx wouldve said about this... 3dfx glide anyone?
I may be very, very wrong, however it was my impression that the "rendered" graphics of modern video cards are shortcut 3D images that are very, very unlike raytraced images: i.e. Quake3 looks nice, but it looks absolutely nothing like the stunning beauty of a Truespace or 3dsmax image (i.e. one is averaging surface point lighting, whereas the other is actually tracing the rays of light throwing shadows, umbras, etc). I though the Quadra cards were only really relevant for modeling (i.e. moving stuff around and such), but they still used an FPU for the real rendering.
very bad math
indeed....
From IMDB:
Final Fantasy was shot at 1.85:1.
Anyway, movie aspect ratios have varied ever since the advent of TV. Movies were originally all shot at 1.33:1, and when TV was popularized, it used that aspect ratio. The movie industry was panicked that TV would steal all its customers, so it came up with all sorts of names for new and exciting aspect ratios like "panavision" and "cinemascope". It had nothing to do with technical matters like shooting on 35 millimeter film (and not all films are shot on 35 millimeter, BTW), though, and everything to do with marketting. Because different companies used different systems, the aspect ratios varied wildly by film. Today, the aspect ratio is a choice of the director. 1.85:1 is the most common, but not the only one by any means, and is mostly used for movies where the look of the film is secondary. Special effects movies usually use something bigger. here is some more info.
The cake is a pie
this is all really great, but Final Fantasy wasn't made by building the scens and hitting the render button. these things are carefully constructed in multiple stages, rendered in multiple passes, and the various elements composited together. Most of the charcters movements were motion-captured, I believe, so this comparison is even sillier. If all you do is take the average number of polygons per film frame and compare with the peak polygon shifting power of the card, we've been getting these kind of stories for years. When the Amiga first managed to display the same number of pixels per second as the TV, didn't mean we were suddenly seeing TV quality computer graphics did it?
Which resolution was the "realtime" rendering done at? And did they only do an OpenGL playback of the scene, or did they actually do a full render(With special drivers and software to utilize the hardware)?
I just saw the demo. It looks NOWHERE as good as the real movie, geometry and lighting/textures are all greatly simplified. The action is definately watchable, which implies > 1 fps. (Looks like around 5-10 fps to me). Aki's hair is made up of WAY less strands (but thick, so she's not balding) and the skin textures aren't as detailed. Still, very impressive. If what I saw was a video game, it'd be GREAT!!!
Does it mean I can now see the movie from whatever point of view I like? Hope it does.
UgaBuga!
what does realtime rendering give us?
1. "What now, master?"
2. "Now turn around, bend down and touch your toes!"
"There are nearly 1.5 million vertices rendered every second just to create the hair in the demo. That is more than the average number of hairs on the human head!"
ooohh.. ahhh.. 1.5 million.. erm at 60FPS try only 25000.. Oh.. but thats right.. it doesnt run at 60FPS.. or did they just work out how many in a frame and multiply by 60.. hehe.. stats.. you just gotta love them..
From the Yahoo article: "The real-time demonstration was made possible by NVIDIA's nfiniteFX(TM) shading technology, including vertex and pixel shaders, to overcome the technical challenges presented in creating realistic skin, hair, clothing and other organic attributes."
But the odd thing is - why do they quote vertices when they state they are using vertex/pixel shaders for effects?
That pretty much means those 1.5 million vertices are just hardware algo generated verts/pixels (and not from the actual scene), which really means stuff all. And in fact it is very disturbing they are trying to bluff people with statistics (although NVIDIA are getting good at it - anyone remember their driver fiasco for the GF3).
Really, all this is, is fluffy crud to make people go.. "ooooh.. ahhhh.." I doubt very much they are are rendering anywhere near the full scene poly count, when a single scene enters the poly per pixel level, at 2000x1600.. you work it out.
Man, I hate marketing..
If you have a Geforce3, go find the Zoltar demo. It's on the web if you look hard enough. Something like 220 megabytes worth of crap, and all it does is model and animate a human head. But HOLY SHIT does it look incredible! Also, find the Chameleon demo. Again, Google is your friend.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This would make home system very interesting, as your Crystal Drive player could render the scene from any angle you like, instead of being limited to just one (or a few). Then, of course, the change to holographic projection is just around the corner... :)
Of course, if you had a ten year old rendering system, your movie would be rendered in lower quality... That should make the producers of those systems happy as well (who might decide just to not render newer movies :( ).
They bring out 90 demos a week it seams like the carpet floating with bump maping or the super quada race track demo Bleh Nvidia also said The floating point performance of the NVIDIA Quadro DCC used to render a single frame in the tech demo, is greater than the total compute power of a Cray Supercomputer. a 399$ video card takeing on a cray? Bwahahaha m0zone You will be masterbateing to alot of nvidia Demos WHEN YOUR LIVE'N IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER
Final Fantasy was anime. Since when have we expected anime films to have good scripts? OK, The Matrix had a pretty good script. Apart from that.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
How could it be 90 minutes per frame as the article states? Did the animators sit around for the 35 years it took to render the movie ?? More Bad Math. Someone mod this up.
Just got back from work where I took off the first part of the day to visit Siggraph. There are two places where they are running the real time rendering of Final Fantasy the Movie. One is at Squaresoft's booth, which I didn't have time to check out unfortunately, and the other at Nvidia's booth, which I did check out. Among the FF movie they were giving out free passes for In and Out food which they served today and will serve again on Wednesday from 5:30-7:30 PM (in case anyone else is there and is hungry) and the best bag for your haul of swag (visit there first!). Of course they had the assorted booklets and brochures there as well.
About Final Fantasy the movie, it was definitely in real time (I saw someone moving around light sources), didn't try it personally to see if you could change the perspective) and included footage of Aki Ross and Dr. Cid talking to each other, I'd say about 3 minutes of footage. 2.4 FPS is way off the mark (were they rendering it at a higher resolution or with more lights?) for the speed when I saw it, I'd say it was running at somewhere between 5-7 FPS. It appeared that they were doing it at about 800x600 resolution (couldn't get really terribly close, too big of a crowd when
The texture maps appeared a bit simplified compared to the movie, but never the less blew everything else I saw away. It's a hell of a new chip they made.
I was at Siggraph and I thought that it was rendering at higher than 2.5 FPS - it looked more like 5 or 6 FPS, but I could've been wrong. I snapped a photo of it. It can be found here