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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.
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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.
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
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
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.