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Making Graphics In Games '100,000 Times' Better?
trawg writes "A small Australian software company — backed by almost AUD$2 million in government assistance — is claiming they've developed a new technology which is '100,000 times better' for computer game graphics. It's not clear what exactly is getting multiplied, but they apparently 'make everything out of tiny little atoms instead of flat panels.' They've posted a video to YouTube which shows their new tech, which is apparently running at 20 FPS in software. It's (very) light on the technical details, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but they say an SDK is due in a few months — so stay tuned for more."
John Carmack had this to say about the company's claims: "No chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging."
The "goal" of crazy people who don't actually understand computers has always been to make graphics (and sometimes logic) based on "atoms"/particles/etc. The problem is not that it can't be done - anyone who has ever used a 3D modeling program with fluid dynamics has that power right in front of them - the problem is that it can't realistically be done in real time with our technology. Hell, it can't realistically be done pre-rendered without a supercomputer.
So sure, it could make it '100,000 times better.' No one is really debating that, and it isn't news to anyone who knows the first thing about graphics. What would be news would be hardware that better supported it. Somehow, I don't think that's what we have here. Notice the lack of specifics as to what KIND of graphics they seek to improve.
Looks like the Australians just got scammed for 2 million.
Great Intellect...
They've definitely proved they're capable at:
- Hiring the most annoying voice over guy.
- Over use of the word 'unlimited.'
Thankfully they have UNLIMITED POWER at their disposal to prove any further developments.
(I submitted this article) I fired off a request for more information from the developers about this and they got back to me indicating they're willing to answer some more questions, so I've summarised some of the main ones that I've seen around the place.
We're based in the same city as this company (Brisbane, Australia) so I'm hoping that I might be able to actually go out there and eyeball this stuff myself to get a feel for it (and possibly drag along a graphics programmer to do some grilling).
one Sri Chinmoy Library
(1 LoC [= 147M items] / 100000 ~ 1 SCL [~ 1.5K items])
hope this helps,
sincerely yours
High quality voxel graphics with dynamic deformation would allow a whole new level of user-generated content.
Imagine something like world of warcraft meets second life, but without all the furries. (Something where if you take a shovel, and dig, you can dig up rocks, and other bits-- or even bury loot, or build a house out of ambient materials, and have it be persistent.)
Some people might complain that it opens the doors to world vandalism ([sarcasm]Oh dear, somebody wrote the word "Penis" in 30 foot letters on the ground by making trenches! They even drew one next to the word! Oh, think of the children! [/sarcasm]) but I think such vandalism would actually allow a richer and more dynamic character interaction to such a world, because it would motivate people to go clean it up.
Think-- sandcastles at the beach, Footprints in the sand, and other immersive details that could result.
The idea here is not to try to entertain the user directly, but to supply the user with what they need to entertain themselves, or others.
Aren't they simply calling pixels atoms, and rasterizing images, as opposed to vectorizing them? I fail to see any novel technology. I'm happy to listen though if there is something involved I missed.
If they really could do realtime graphics that were "100,000 times" more detailed than current stuff, they'd do one of two things:
1) Release a demo so people could actually try it and see it working on their systems, to prove it was real. Or more likely...
2) License that shit to a company in the industry. Intel would be extremely interested if it ran on CPUs as they'd love for people to spend more money on CPUs and none on GPUs. Any game engine maker would be extremely interested either way. Wouldn't matter if things still had to be hammered out, at the point they claim to be, that would be more than plenty to sign a licensing deal and get to work.
So I'm calling bullshit and saying it is a con. This is classic con man strategy: You show a demo, but one that is hands off, where the people watching only get to see what you want them to see and don't actually get to play with your product. You make all sorts of claims as to how damn amazing it is, but nobody actually gets to try it out.
This has been a con tactic for centuries, I've no reason to believe it is any different here.
So to them I say: Put up or shut up. Either release a demo people can download that will let them see this run on their own systems, or get a reputable company to license it. If Intel comes out and says "This is for real, we've licensed the technology and will be releasing a SDK for people as soon as it is ready," I'll believe them, as they have a history of delivering on promises. So long as it is some random guys posting Youtube videos, I call bullshit.
This russian guy made his own voxel engine as well, which I believe is hardware accelerated and also pretty impressive: http://www.atomontage.com/
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Which is the whole trick, this was shown off at least a year ago, it pops up now and then.
The tech precalculates a LOT, for that it needs static model information.
The site of the creators is http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=11624.30 they talked about it last year.
This is probably not actually what is generally called "voxels", but a hierarchical point cloud system consisting of points on the surface of objects, rendered via some kind of weighted splatting mechanism. There was a lot of research into such systems for visualising some of the very high resolution point clouds coming out of digital laser scanning systems (for example QSplat, which came out of the Digital Michelangelo project http://graphics.stanford.edu/software/qsplat/).
1) except the games industry is bigger than Hollywood by far
2) The department that provided the funding looks to be Commercialisation Australia, which seems to basically be a government-backed VC-like operation - I can only imagine that exists because of the paltry VC in Australia.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
I see this as the equivalent of FLAC vs MP3 - yeah, sure it's definitely contains more information but at the cost of storage size and, in the end, 99% of people won't actually care.
But FLAC sounds so much better then 512Kib/s mp3 with my $ 15 headphones and on-board soundcard!
>>High quality voxel graphics with dynamic deformation would allow a whole new level of user-generated content.
Yeah, that would actually be pretty damn neat. None of what they showed was dynamic, though.
About 10 years ago, when I was doing a lot of work with voxels, I'd arrange all the voxels in an octree and could adjust the framerate/detail simply by how far down each object's octree I'd traverse. I could have large, coarse voxels, or small, precise ones, adjust for distance from the viewer, and so forth. It worked out pretty well. They even made hardware voxel accelerators.
These Australian guys are claiming they're doing doing voxels, but whatever the hell their "little bitty atoms" tech means then, it looks awfully familiar to me.
They say quite clearly that their little bitty atom tech is based on point clouds (not voxels).
Allegedly they have 21 trillion atoms in that scene. Now pardon my skepticism, but if that's say 1byte per 'atom' (a massivey concservative estimate), then you'll need about 20,000Gb of data storage alone. Now. They are either a) lying, or b) bending the truth massively (i.e. we only have 1 model, instanced 200,,000,000 times). They also claim that they can convert a polygon mesh into a point cloud. Well. That's not hard to do, but you will be inherently limited by the detail of the original mesh, so it's still going to have the same jaggies as before. i.e. It won't look much different
They also claim that 'poly counts are pretty low in games'. Well. Compared to the raw number of triangles your average geforce card can theoretically process, that's very true - mainly because the pixel shader cost tends to be the biggest bottleneck in graphics at the moment. I can't see many ways this tech would be able to reduce that burdon to be honest.
Imho. This tech is nothing more than vapourware (or more likely, just some lame youtube troll spouting some unrealistic nonsense over a video pre-rendered out of 3ds max).
of course much of the atoms are the same, and you don't see them all at once. most of it is calculated, somewhat like fractals. so you don't really need as much storage.
Ok, so we don't see them all at once. To be honest, if a middleware company can't write a furstum cull, they would be closed by now!
But what do they do then when they are not seen? Sod off for a holiday in the cloud? Seriously. I think you are missing the point. Where the hell is this data being stored, and what is the size of the data set? It's got to be in memory *at some point*, and hard disk if it's not. So how much ram/disk space will this thing use exactly? Ok, so 'most of it is calculated, somewhat like fractals', well ok. But which bits? Are the trees fractals (or L-systems maybe)?. Just the leaves? The Models of the rocks they have scanned in? The 3ds max models they have converted to point clouds? The whole island? Answers to these questions need to be provided before any games developer would even bother looking at this tech. Either it's all procedural (in which case it's utterly useless for game designers), it's primarily procedural (in which case the art director will struggle to achieve a consistent look), it's partially procedural (which will annoy the modelling & texturing departments), or it's a load of made up lies. I'm erring towards the latter.....
Procedural generation works better than you would expect. .debris (http://91.202.41.234/debris/) and .kkrieger (http://91.202.41.234/kkrieger) - they occupy virtually no space, are lengthy, interactive and perfectly playable on any modern machine with average CPU capabilities.
Look at these two examples:
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
There's an awful lot of object instancing in their videos (same object repeated multiple times).
The numbers they're quoting are the number of 'atoms' you see on screen, not the number of atoms in the computer's memory.
No sig today...
Compared to the raw number of triangles your average geforce card can theoretically process, that's very true
And no mention from the video about what kind of hardware is powering that humble 20fps "real time" preview. Even if we accept that statement, if it takes a supercomputer to get to 20fps that's not going to have much market. Given that this tech is totally different from where the industry is going, they should probably be talking with NVidia / AMD about what the hardware can help even make it feasible. Carmack is right, the hardware just simply isn't there, and for that matter is not even trending that way.
it's still going to have the same jaggies as before
I'm guessing they can at least do some post-processing steps to smooth it out a bit. Some kind of curve matching or something, doesn't sound impossible and has all the time it needs to grind it out. Or possibly just simple human post-processing on the "low detail" imports, as that's probably how they did it for this demo.
Fear is the mind killer.
Something where if you take a shovel, and dig, you can dig up rocks, and other bits-- or even bury loot, or build a house out of ambient materials, and have it be persistent.
Yeah, that'd be awesome. A game where you could mine and craft all kinds of stuff... what to call it...
I don't know about you but I would call it "Nethack"
I think this is all just a ploy to provide Intel with a market for their Knights Ferry chips -- this won't run on GPU hardware on current systems apparently, so you need CPU might. Where do you get that? Knights Ferry, obviously.
Still, it sounds very cool, if only for statically-rendered stuff like wallpapers and movies.
Most games recently just kind of suck and rest upon the shoulders of innovative graphics. This does not make me hopeful for the future of gaming.
Generally speaking, I'm in agreement on the suck part, but hold on a second there with the conclusion. If this technology is real and games do see a massive jump forward in graphics, wouldn't that allow for an end to each successive title needing to simply out-polygon the competition? Isn't it equally likely this would force a paradigm shift, where if nothing else art- real art, would supplant technical graphics specs?
they occupy virtually no space
That's not exactly true. While they require almost no disk space, they do require quite a bit of RAM. Just because all the textures and models are procedurally generated doesn't make the need to store them go away. If things would be dynamically generated each frame in a geometry or pixel shader things might look different, but that is a whole lot more complicated then just procedural generation.