7 Years of 3D Graphics

xtra writes "At Accelenation they are running a nice timeline about 7 years of pc 3d graphics contains much info and even talks about some of the not so well known players anyone still remember rendition? or BitBoys?" How many cards on their timeline chart have you used?

Comments

How fast do we really need to go?

[TrollMan 5000]

Can graphics technology possibly get any faster? Well the GeForce2 GTS chip ran Quake3 at 80fps in May of 2000. Just twenty-two months later a GeForce4 Ti4600 can run Quake3 over three times faster. On that reckoning the GeForce6 in two years time should be running Quake3 at over 700fps. Is that fast enough for you!

Is there really much visual difference between 700 fps and 135 fps? I'm not really sure if the human eye can make the distinction. They're sure pretty-looking numbers, but do the results show for it?

And how long before video cards can render essentially photo-realistic graphics? Soon games will be more like interactive movies.

Re:How fast do we really need to go?

[Hieronymus Howard]

Ray tracing isn't the only way to achieve high-quality graphics. Renderman (used for Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and plenty others) isn't a ray tracer, but a sub-pixel renderer (if I remember my computer graphics M.Sc. correctly).

We've still got a very long way to go until we get Monsters Inc. quality real-time games. As you say, current cards render triangles. Curved surface rendering (e.g. NURBS) may come next. Anti-aliasing takes a lot of power. I think that current cards are still using Gourard shading, which is the most primitive shading model there is (correct me if I'm wrong here). The next step is Phong shading for highlight effects (there are hardware-optimised Phong shading algorithms, but they're still slower than Gourard). Then there's deformation mapping (Renderman again), etc. etc.

I believe that Quake 3 etc. does use radiosity algorithms, but that doesn't need to be done in real time, just when the level is compiled.

HH

Re:How fast do we really need to go?

[bribecka]

Renderman (used for Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and plenty others) isn't a ray tracer, but a sub-pixel renderer (if I remember my computer graphics M.Sc. correctly).

You're referring to PhotoRealistic Renderman (PRMan), the actual product developed by Pixar. It uses the REYES algorithm.

RenderMan is a specification for defining 3D scenes, much as PostScript is a specification for defining 2D documents/images. There are many renderers that are RenderMan compatible, including raytracers such as BMRT.

Re:Why 7 years?

[Strog]

From the article:This article should really be called "7 Years of 3D Graphics" because 3D acceleration seemed a suitable starting point..

The point was accelerated 3D not "software" 3D. I still remember bombing runs from Ace of Aces on a Commodore 128 though it definitely wasn't a hardware accelerated game.

Re:Demo scene.

[2Flower]

Future Crew reassembled, broke up, faded out, tried to get into the games biz, etc. Their site has been offline for awhile.

Fortunately the demo scene lives on; pouet hosts links to nearly every demo in existence across multiple platforms. And to keep us on topic, most demos nowadays are 3-D accelerated. It's become less a game of "What techie tricks can you do?" and more a game of "How artistically can you use the technology?". There's some visually striking demos being made nowadays, and not just because they have shadebobs or glenz cubes.

Two words :

[Viking Coder]

"Motion blur".

Or how about "rendering passes"?

Or how about "anti-aliasing"? (Kind of cheating on that one.)

Or how about "soft shadows"?

In short, more is better. If you give me higher framerate, I'll figure out what to do with those extra cycles.

Re:Two words :

[Viking Coder]

I forgot to mention "reduced latency."

If you can render the entire image in the 1/700th of a second before the screen refresh, you can much more accurately track events than if it took you 1/60th of a second to render the image. USB mice allow a much higher sampling rate that you could take advantage of, for instance. When you incorporate things like motion-tracking polhemus devices, and a head-mounted display, things get really interesting.

Re:Number Nine

[Zurk]

Actually i think number 9 had the first 128bit graphics chip on board not 128 megs of memory.
again i could be wrong.

Re:Infinity and beyond...

[Boone^]

the GF3 uses vectors for calculations. An Athlon using the x86 CISC requires more overhead per instruction.

Athlon:
add ax,bx; % where ax and bx are 32-bit scalars

GF3:
add reg0, reg1; % where reg0 and reg1 are vectors of scalars

If you wanted to do the same work of the GF3 on an Athlon, you'd need 32 (or however deep the vector registers are) successive instructions.

Once you ditch the instruction overhead for doing an operation on X number of successive scalars, the processor spends more time doing the math and the FLOPS goes up. Take a look at the AltiVec unit in the G4, or CRAY vector supercomputers.

Re:Number Nine

[Milalwi]

You only need 16MB to handle the highest resolution computer graphics displays ever made.

This is true for 2D displays, but when you start having double and triple buffering plus z-buffers it starts to add up. Then add the texture requirement and you can see why most newer cards have 64-128MB of memory on the cards.

Milalwi

Re:Number Nine

[ram.loss]

I think you mean the first consumer level graphics card to use a 128 *bit* data path. I remember seeing them bundled with Dells in the back cover of Byte a few years ago.

Re:Demo scene.

[sph]

In a related note, what the hell ever happened to the Future Crew?

The actual Future Crew is no more, but many of the members have been active in various projects in for example gaming industry. You may have heard of Max Payne, made by Remedy Entertainment, or 3DMark, made by MadOnion. Though not really related to FC, they both employ former FC members, and may be the best known examples. As for other demosceners, some Byterapers members were involved in Rally Trophy, made by Bugbear. It also features some music by Purple Motion/FC.

Any other examples of demosceners, perhaps from outside of Finland?-)

More memory

[Traa]

> You only need 16MB to handle the highest
> resolution computer graphics displays ever made

you will allways need more memory (in 3D graphics accelerators), even if the display resolutions don't increase. Lets say we settle for a nice 2000x2000 ish display. Thats 4M pixels, at 32-bit is 16MB for the display.
At least double (32MB) but preferably triple (48MB) buffer this so you can create a new frame while the old one is being displayed. Then we need a Z-buffer (or W-buffer) to hold the depth values (24bit values) for each pixel, so we know what is in front of what, typically you might want to do some stencil effects to (8-bits, can be packed with the Z-buffer) that would be another 16MB. Now we have the basics for a 3D graphics display and are at 48-64MB.

But we are not done yet, now for some more interesting effects:
- Texture memory. Typically use the leftover graphics memory and swap the rest from host memory (but we don't like swapping, so preferably all textures should be in onboard mem) 2-64MB
- 2x Antialiasing (1 Backbuffer + 1 Z-buffer 2*2*size of display buffer) = 64MB (4x antialiasing = 256MB)
- Shadowbuffer (rendering into a kind of Z-buffer from the lightsource to create realistic shadows) 16MB
- Accumulation buffer effects like motion blur (very expensive, a good blur could take 4 to 32 frames) or depth of view could make us want another 4-32*16=64-512MB

I for one could easily use more then 1GB of onboard graphics memory.

Re:Demo scene.

[Cruciform]

Skaven did the music for Bejewled (Windows Version).

Palm version here, but I'm guessing it lacks the tunes :)