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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?
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).
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.
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.
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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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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!
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?
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- 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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.'
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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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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.
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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.
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