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Final Fantasy At 2.5FPS

Posted by timothy on from the that's-a-lot-of-pixels dept.

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.

4 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. Rendering in real-time won't happen... by soboroff · · Score: 5, Informative
    ``It has long been an artist's dream to render CG animation in real-time,'' stated Kazuyuki Hashimoto, CTO at Square USA.
    We've been able to render CG animation in real time since Ivan Sutherland was a grad student. What makes it hard is a classic Parkinson's law: your needs expand to fill existing processor power. When the movie companies and animation houses have more horsepower, they will go to the next level and push the state of the art in CG back from what's capable of being done in real-time.

    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.

  2. It doesn't look as good as the movie by ThisIsNotATest · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  3. A few factors to consider ... by misaka · · Score: 5, Informative
    It sure sounds nice when they write that they can render something that took 90 mins per frame at .4 seconds per frame, but is this really a fair comparison? I don't doubt that NVIDIA is bringing some wicked technologies to the table, but let's also consider:
    1. 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.
    2. 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
    3. 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 .4 seconds render time comparison.

    --M

  4. Re:Apples to Oranges? by MarkoNo5 · · Score: 5, Informative

    From http://movieweb.com/movie/toystory/toystory.txt

    "RESOLUTION:The resolution of a digital image refers to the number of pixels stored. For "Toy Story," the resolution is typically 1536 x 922 pixels."

    Marko No. 5