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Real-Time, Movie-Quality CGI For Games

Posted by kdawson on from the we-can-animate-it-for-you-wholesale dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An Intel-owned development team can now render CGI-quality graphics in real time. 'Their video clips show artists pulling together 3D elements like a jigsaw puzzle (see for example this video starting at about 3:38), making movie-level CG look as easy as following a recipe.' They hope that the simplicity of 'Project Offset' could ultimately give them the edge in the race to produce real-time graphics engines for games."

4 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. As a former (contract) developer on Project Offset by whiplashx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    4 or 5 years ago, it was basically comparable to Unreal 3. The motion blur was probably the best feature I saw. Fine graphics, but nothing really mind blowing. Having said that, I have not seen what they've done since Intel bought them, but I'm guessing its basically support for Intel's research projects.

    As a developer of modern console and PC games, My Professional Opinion is that there's nothing new to see here.

  2. Re:Pictures? by am+2k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, that's how the characters in the older Myst games worked (except that they used this great new technology called "video camera" to get moving pictures into them).

    This was fine in those games, because the viewpoint was always fixed. That's a restriction you don't want to have in current games.

  3. Re:"Movie-Quality" by Zerth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    According to this, the original Toy Story needed about 7 TFLOPS to render in real time, although I've seen higher estimates.

    87 dual-processor and 30 quad-processor 100-MHz SPARCstation 20s took 46 days to do ~75 minutes, so you need to be 883.2 times as fast to render in realtime. Anyone overclock a quadcore processor to 8 GHz? I suppose setup with 4 quadcore cpus @ 2GHz isn't out of reach.

    But then again, the machines might have been IO bound instead of CPU bound, needing to send 7.7 gigabytes per second.

  4. Re:What this really means is ... by biryokumaru · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I read a really great short story once about a future where all films are made completely on computers, with AI actors. Then one guy starts filming movies with a real girl in them, just with computerized scenery, and doesn't tell anyone. It blows people away just how "real" his films feel compared to normal movies.

    Anyone else read that? It was pretty good.

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