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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.
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?
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.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
That's pure film. Anything using an optical printer(used for special effects, titles, CG stuff) or other method for combining film and computer effects needs to be at least twice as fast.
The following sentence is TRUE. The previous sentence is FALSE.
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.
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.
- 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.
No, he was absolutly correct. Toy story is not close to being rendered in real time yet and this isn't the same. There are many details to the REYES architecture that is used in PRman and likewise used to render toy story. One is the subdivision of NURBS patches and subdivision surfaces to the pixel level. Another is the surface, light, and volume shaders used. There are many many things that people are missing when they say 'Movie X rendered in real time'. What they really mean is 'Movie X rendered in near realtime, at a MUCH lower resolution, with a bajillion hacks to make it look as close as possible to the original.'
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
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.
The 1920x1080 figure quoted is the upper end of the HDTV standards. There is a very good reason the new digital cameras used by Lucas et al.. are capturing at that size. If you capture at 1920x1080 digital, then you cut an entire step out of the process of producing for the much more lucrative home markets.
I know that no one is broadcasting or releasting at 1080i resolution yet, but it's only a matter of time. DVD has allowances for this, as do some of the new tubes coming out of sony. Even my 19inch monitor sitting here on my desk does 1920x1080.
Scott
PS. DivX encoded 1920x1080 Lightwave rendered animations look sweeeeeeeet...
Flim resolution is around 3500x2000 (I know the ratio isn't exactly right) from what I learned in imaging class a couple years ago. All films are shot on 35mm film typically, which has a 4x3 ratio. However, they capture it with an anamorphic lens which basically compresses a 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 ratio (films are NOT shot at 16x9) onto the 4:3 film. Then, in a theater, they project with the same lenses to unstretch it. Try watching a DVD on a 4:3 TV with the DVD player set to anamorphic mode (for 16:9 TV's) and you can see what I mean. Anyway, people are keen on using digital film and digital projection because it saves cost in duplication, editing, equipment, etc... I have yet to find any serious film person that acually says that digital video has a technical advantage in resolution, detail, contrast ratio, or anything like that. Digital Video is great for many things, don't get me wrong, but unless there is an improvement, instead of just being close to as good, I'd like to stick with film for the moment.
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
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!!!
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.