Real-Time, Movie-Quality CGI For Games

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."

Comments

Wow

[binarylarry]

They've discovered the hidden secrets to rendering Academy Award winning films such as "Gears of War" and "Crysis."

Congrats Intel dev team!

Re:Wow

[Yvan256]

Those aren't award winning films.

They're award winning slideshows.

Re:Wow

[stephanruby]

This is lame. The guy doesn't even claim the video was made in real-time. He claims that the editing of the game can be done in real-time. That distinction is important, because most of the time I see someone demoing a 3-D editing tool on Youtube, they've accelerated the demo by a huge factor -- just to make the video look cool (and it does look cool that way, but it's also misleading). By the way, here is the same demo "teaser" referenced through youtube, there is actually no need to have to wait for the 3 minutes and 38 seconds on that other video for the boring guy to stop droning on, it's essentially the same teaser (with the same building and the same shading) -- it's just been spliced into the interview in small pieces (as if to imply that the teaser was made at the same speed the interview was videotaped at).

Great...

[Beelzebud]

Now maybe they can get to work on shipping on-board graphics cards that can actually play games released within the past couple of years...

CGI-quality graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

now there we have an accurate statement: "Computer Generated Imagery" quality graphics

Re:CGI-quality graphics

[pushing-robot]

Obviously he's a member of the Tautology Club that has him as a member.

Re:As long as Moore's law holds

[binarylarry]

Unfortunately, the faster the processors get, fancier rendering features become possible in the offline space as well.

Realtime rendering will never be on par with offline rendering of the same vintage.

"Movie-Quality"

[nitehawk214]

"Movie-Quality" is basically a worthless statement. Which movie? Avatar, Final Fantasy, Toy Story, Tron? The quality of digitally produced movies, and the quality of game graphics power are constantly moving targets.

Re:"Movie-Quality"

[drinkypoo]

This is basically what I was going to say. The latest crop of "funny fuzzy animal" movies have graphics about as good as the best video games — the secret to making games look as good as movies is apparently to make movies look shitty. I just can't sit through a movie that doesn't look as good as playing a game. I also can't sit through a movie with a worse plot than nethack, but that's a separate issue. Unfortunately, the aforementioned movies suffer from both of these failings.

Re:"Movie-Quality"

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure, but I can tell you that we're nowhere near rendering state of the art movie CGI in real time. Vertex and pixel shaders have enabled a class of effects that were previously impossible in real time, but those are all direct lighting effects or crude approximations of indirect lighting. Shadows are not really smooth, they're just blurred. Realistic smooth shadows depend on the size of the light source and are computationally prohibitive on current hardware under real time constraints. Movie-quality CGI includes a class of light interactions which is currently impossible in real time, for example caustics: A caustic is light which is reflected or refracted onto a surface which reflects diffusely. Light being refracted by the surface of a swimming pool is an effect which can be faked but not simulated in real time. Render farms use an algorithm called Photon Mapping to simulate this and other complicated light interactions. This algorithm is conceptually related to Raytracing but even more computationally intensive. It does not map well to the hardware which is currently used in the real time rendering pipeline.

Re:"Movie-Quality"

[Zerth]

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.

Re:"Movie-Quality"

[beelsebob]

And just to put this in perspective, current GPUs manage somewhere in the region of 2TFlops, so assuming we can encode Pixar's raytracing/radiocity algorithm into OpenCL that will actually run on one of these cards and not drop to software, then the hard-to-render frames would still take 1.17 seconds to spit out. We need about another 2 orders of magnitude improvement before we're there. That will only take a few years from now though, so we're close, but no cigar.

As a former (contract) developer on Project Offset

[whiplashx]

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.

Re:Who will write the software for the bird?

[PotatoFarmer]

At what point will the hardware capabilities exceed the software we can write?

Never. More hardware means programmers can get away with writing less efficient code.

define movie quality

[poly_pusher]

As stated by other posters, "film quality" is misleading. Primarily it refers to resolution and remember many cameras record at up to 4k, so the ability to render in real time at ultra-high res is definitely sought after.

Currently, the big push in 3d rendering is towards physically based raytrace or pathtrace rendering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)
Physically based rendering produces a much more accurate representation of how light interacts with and between surfaces. It has always taken a long time to render using physically based techniques due to the huge amount of calculations necessary to produce a grain free image. This has changed somewhat recently with multi-core systems and with GPGPU languages such as CUDA and OpenCL we are about to experience a big and sudden increase in performance regarding these rendering technologies.

While this game looks great, the engine is by no means going to be capable of rendering scenes containing hundreds of millions of polygons, ultra-high res textures, physically accurate lighting and shaders, and high render resolution. We are still pretty far away from real-time physically-based rendering, which is the direction film is currently headed. So that would have to be what "Movie-Quality CGI" is defined as and this game does not live up to that definition.

Re:As long as Moore's law holds

[AmberBlackCat]

I think those are Mike & Ike's...

Re:What this really means is ...

[biryokumaru]

I hate it when people hate on people hating on something they hate just to get karma points just to get karma points.

It's almost as bad as people hating on people hating on people hating on something they hate just to get karma points just to get karma points just to get karma points.

Grammar works like nesting things, right?

Re:Pictures?

[am 2k]

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.

Re:What this really means is ...

[biryokumaru]

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.

Re:As long as Moore's law holds

[Pseudonym]

Absolutely true, but there is an apex that both achieve to reach which is photo realistic rendering.

No, because "photo realism" is not a goal that visual effects aspires to. If you can take a photo of something, then it's almost always cheaper and better to do that, even though it usually requires many thousands of dollars on crew, make up, sets and lighting.

CGI is used for things that you can't take a photo of, such as a Na'vi or a talking ant. If the space ship can travel faster than light, or the penguin can dance, then "realistic" is not a goal.

(Disclaimer: I used to work in visual effects.)

FINALLY!!!one

[AlgorithMan]

FINALLY we can have CGI-quality in computer games!
It was such a pain, when computers couldn't achieve the quality of COMPUTER GENERATED IMAGES