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2000x GPU Performance Needed To Reach Anatomical Graphics Limits For Gaming?
Vigile writes "In a talk earlier this year at DICE, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney discussed the state of computing hardware as it relates to gaming. While there is a rising sentiment in the gaming world that the current generation consoles are 'good enough' and that the next generation of consoles might be the last, Sweeney thinks that is way off base. He debates the claim with some interesting numbers, including the amount of processing and triangle power required to match human anatomical peaks. While we are only a factor of 50x from the necessary level of triangle processing, there is 2000x increase required to meet the 5000 TFLOPS Sweeney thinks will be needed for the 8000x4000 resolution screens of the future. It would seem that the 'good enough' sentiment is still a long way off for developers."
My question is this: how much more will games have to cost to support the development to this level of detail?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
It needs more power. OH HO HO!
better looking "anatomical peaks"!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
640K should be enough for anyone
there is a rising sentiment in the gaming world that the current generation consoles are 'good enough' and that the next generation of consoles might be the last
If developers can't find a way to improve games beyond the next generation, it's not because we've reached some peak of gaming possibilities, it's just because those particular developers have reached the peak of their imaginations.
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming. It will require a lot more computing power than the current generation of PC's, much less consoles. If he were to pitch it at EA, he would be laughed at. If he tried to explain it at a Game Developers Conference, he would be greeted by blank stares and derision. He's probably already used to hearing responses like "That can't be done", "Who would want THAT?", "That could never be done on a console", etc. But one day people will look back and say "Wow, how could they *not* have seen that that was the future?" and "How could they have been so arrogant as to think that gaming had peaked with the millionth variation of the FPS?".
What's more, I suspect that even Sweeney is off-base. The next real innovation won't be about improving resolution or framerates to some theoretical max, or making an even prettier FPS. It will be some whole new way of thinking about gaming that is just in the mind of that weird guy right now. Most of us can no more imagine it now than some guy playing Pacman could have foreseen Half-Life 2. But it's coming.
Every generation thinks it's special. But never be so arrogant as to think your generation has somehow reached the pinnacle of achievement in ANY area.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...this would be awesome for bitcoin mining.
When the article's authors have shoehorned a word so obviously not related to the subject matter into the subject line, and then go on to repeat it over and over again, only one of two things can be true:
1. There were no better words in the dictionary, and rather than taking the sensible approach of creating a new one, they opened to a page at random, stuck their finger on it, and started using whatever their finger touched.
2. Author was trying to sound trendy and interesting.
As a footnote, salahamada is a made-up word waiting patiently for its debut. Give it a little love?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Think of how glorious the reflective spheres and checkerboards will be bro!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming. It will require a lot more computing power than the current generation of PC's, much less consoles. If he were to pitch it at EA, he would be laughed at. If he tried to explain it at a Game Developers Conference, he would be greeted by blank stares and derision. He's probably already used to hearing responses like "That can't be done", "Who would want THAT?", "That could never be done on a console", etc. But one day people will look back and say "Wow, how could they *not* have seen that that was the future?" and "How could they have been so arrogant as to think that gaming had peaked with the millionth variation of the FPS?".
68% of you won't re-post this, but the 42% of you with VISION will. Our voices will be heard! No fees for gaming, or we'll QUIT VIDEOGAMES!
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
i remember when cell first came out and sony was starting the hype on it's use in the PS3. i can't say whether or not it has reached it's potential, but if you want to see just how important optimization is, go find a video comparison between skyrim on ps3/xbox/PC and then go watch the new Kara trailer from quantic dream. you mean to tell me that uncharted is the best we can expect from the current gen consoles and that we are "good enough" now? what a load of crap. if i had a dev on my team run with the "it's good enough" argument, i'd can his ass.
Tim's explanations of first- and second- and third-order approximations are somewhat bizarro. Unreal doesn't use second-bounce in its lighting. All game engines are first-bounce only unless they contain some realtime radiosity simulation, and very very few do. This has been true since Wolf 3D and is true today.
And once you have a system for second-bounce, third- and fourth-bounce can be trivially computed (over multiple frames if need be), and the results are hardly different to second-bounce.
I wish I knew what he meant by these levels of approximation.
And he's only talking about rasterization. Expect a switch to raytracing somewhere in the not so near future.
But that won't really matter either. The problem at this point isn't the number of pixels, or the number of polygons, or the depth or resolution of the textures. It's the fact that the image is being projected on a rectangle with a strip of plastic around it. In the end, what we really are shooting for is what literature people call "Suspension of disblief". You can only get so far looking into a glowing rectangle. The wrap-around screens of eyefinity help some, and 3d glasses have the potential to help a little bit.
The reality is that hte most immersive gaming experience I've had was in the mid to late 90's when i was hooked up to a real VR system with a helmet, and held a gun with approximately wii-controller input capability. The ability of that system, despite its craptacular by today's standard rendering capability, to be immersive was much higher, because the ability to see my entire environment by moving my neck and body was more important the the quality of the environment itself.
68% + 42% = 100% eh? Maybe quitting video games would be a good thing for you. It would give you more time to study math.
stationary before the screen which is located close enough for the screen to fill one's vision.
You'll need to go even farther to fill a wall, or better still three or four so that a gaming experience like Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is fully immersive.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Why is an innovation inherently going to make use of more computing power?
And yes, there are pretty clearly areas where there is no practical room for improvement. For example, we have digital audio quality that can exceed the perception of even the best humans, so for humans, there is no reason to go further. That's not to say that there isn't room for improvement, but rather, for such an improvement to be useful, we'll need a better human.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
While describing the layer and textures, it is going to be offset by what is known as "uncanny valley". There is a point at which the reality is flawed because it looks too real for the context.
I'm even starting to see uncanny valley on magazine covergirls after they've been photoshopped till they are almost unrecognizable. There is a point where you stop fixing flaws and start making them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Everyone talks about how far we can push graphics.
But what about pushing the AI?
What about procedural generation of the game?
What about vastly improved physics including a destrucable world?
I'd rather see these things pushing hardware development than how many polygons you can crunch in a second.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
In 5 years, assuming doubling every 18 months, it will only be about 10.5x faster.
I don't think anybody believes we're good enough for 8000x4000, people are talking about 1080p when they say "good enough" for consoles. Seems we're pretty close even with current gen consoles, and if they can quadruple GPU power or more in the next gen consoles it should be fine for years until those higher resolution displays are actually commonplace.
I enjoy reading the responses from armchair know-it-all's that seem to think Sweeney is some sort of light-weight when it comes knowledge about rendering.
Can anyone speak to how the limits of human vision relate to the need for 8000x4000 pixel resolution? I don't know why we need such high resolution for personal home video gaming presuming single player on a 30-45" screen.
I think 2000x GPU power is very much underestimating the potential for a number of reasons:
1: Raytracing / global illumination. In comparison to games with true global illumination, current technology 3D worlds with only direct illumination (or scanline rendering) look crude and unconvincing. Objects appear 'cookie-cutter' like and colours tend not to gel with the overall 3D landscape.
Toy Story 3 took around 7 hours to render each frame. To render in real-time for a video game (say 60 FPS), you would need a processor that was around 1 million times faster than what we have today. And AFAIK, that's mostly using Reyes rendering (which incorporates mostly rasterization techniques with only minimal ray tracing.
2: Worlds made of atoms, voxels or points. This makes a world of difference for both the user and the designer. Walls can be broken through realistically, water can flow properly, and explosions will eat away at the scenery.
2000x? Pah, try 2 TRILLION as a starting point.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Developers used to start off with high resolution models and have to pare down the triangle count and adjust textures to meet memory and processing requirements. In the future, they won't have to do all of that tweaking and will be able to use full resolution models, so it will probably be cheaper.
Also, not all games aim for realistic depictions, many (most?) are stylized, and won't necessarily need to be highly detailed. The extra processing power could go to effects, deformation, physics, etc.
Twinstiq, game news
CAVE systems (such as the "hamster balls" where you have 360/360 vision) offer the best immersive experience. However, I *still* disagree with this "suspension of disbelief" concept. JRR Tolkien described it as being a failure of the person creating the experience and I'll take the opinion of an expert over and above the opinion of just about anyone else.
The number of pixels and the quality of the textures DO matter at this point - you have to cross the Uncanny Valley completely before the perceived quality goes up. The perceived quality will actually FALL until you reach the other side.
Raytracing will help, provided radiosity is added in (raytracing is lousy at diffuse reflections, which matter if you're wanting true realism). Photon tracing and photon mapping are even better, but the computational cost goes up accordingly. To get audio to match video, you really want to use sound tracing techniques too. You have to have the sound (echos included) match expectation or the brain will detect the mismatch and rebel. There's nothing worse than a brain marching up and down the hall making demands.
To get realism to the point where it will be truly "good enough", I would argue that 20,000x current performance is closer to what is required.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why is an innovation inherently going to make use of more computing power?
Didn't the post you're "responding" to that say about the innovation "will be some whole new way of thinking about gaming", rather than just higher resolution, FPS, etc. And did it mention anything at all about using more computing power?
If you're just looking for a place post your two cents on a subject, you could at least make it a reply to something vaguely related to what you're talking about.
It's not that I think what you're saying is wrong; it's just a nonsequitor in this thread.
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming.
But it will never see the light of day because it is genuinely innovative, rather than an rehash of previous ideas that is easily marketed thanks to technological stats.
People value what they can measure.
You're ignoring Sweeny's entire point and arguing that a different proposition - "gaming is as good as it could ever be!" - is false. So what?
Listen to YOU. "Good enough", you say. Do you think that's how the video game console designers, from days and years and years and months ago thought and talked and acted?
Good enough? It's "good enough", that's why the Nintendo Entertainment System dominated the gaming market and we're not all just trading old Atari 5200 cartridges?
"Good enough", that's why there are fifty games starting with the word "Super" for the Super Nintendo?
"Good enough", that's why the Jaguar has two processors with two separate bus widths, and featured Quarantine AND Cybermorph?
"Good enough", that's why the 3D0 had like three first-person AD&D games, Braindead 13, AND all those interactive sex videos?
"Good enough", that's why the Playstation 2 features roughly three or four MORE clones per cloud of exact clones closing in directly on your fighter's position at any given wave along the rails?
"Good enough", that's why the Playstation 3 didn't come with back-compatibility for the PSX?
"GOOD ENOUGH", is that WHY, the Wii makes old people relevant to the video game scene?
GOOD ENOUGH!? IT'S NEVER GOOD ENOUGH! IT ALWAYS SUCKS! ARE YOU WITH ME! LET'S MAKE ANOTHER SHITTY CONSOLE HURRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH1!!!!!!!!!
*CROWDS ROARING, MASTURBATING*
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Nono, totally unrelated: 68% of the people won't repost. 42% who have vision will. So 32% of the people who repost are of the 76% that can see, meaning he considers 24% of the populace to be blind. Apparently there is a high level of head injury in his area resulting in eye trauma.
The post he was replying to said:
That was also my reaction on reading that--- why should we assume that the next great innovation in gaming will necessarily involve "a lot more computing power"? It's possible that there exist such innovations, but I'm also pretty confident that we haven't exploited the gaming possibilities of current hardware, or even of last-gen hardware. Heck, going back further, I don't think the SNES era actually explored all the gaming possibilities that one could've explored on an SNES; the market moved on so some avenues never got explored.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Exponential improvement in technology is the historical norm, yet it can still be difficult to fathom.
2000X should be achievable by 2024, at 2x improvement per year; or by 2029 at 2X every 18 months.
Some of us should see 2 trillion-fold improvement in about 40+ years at 2X per year; or by 2075 at 2X every 18 months.
Barring the occurrence of any variety of manmade and natural disasters, of course.
I don't think so; if you read the first question out loud, he sounds Canadian.
Okay, I like the sound of this. Get me four of those graphics cards so I can SLI the tits out of my hydro bill.
Sure, there is only so much data my eyeballs can process, but larger displays do serve a purpose. For example, I would love to have a 4k projector shooting at my wall, instead of two 27" monitors. Actually, I'd like two, stacked on top of each other. Why ? Because then my wall becomes a giant display surface. Even right now, I can't really mentally process the entirety of my pixel space at once, but the realities of multitasking and my working habits dictate that I need a bunch of windows in the sidelines, so that I may occasionally glance over to consult some chart, monitor logs in real-time, or juggle a half-dozen IM and email convos without getting signals crossed, or keep WoW open in the background while I wait for a damn raid to assemble.
So, if Tim Sweeney wants 8000x4000, then I want 16000x8000. He can render all the anatomically correct games his heart desires, but I want moar datas!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Well, there's some small limited-scope audio baubles that could be improved.
For example, having audio recorded at 192khz allows you to do slow-motion effects without the audio turning into bass sludge (you'd get to hear all that neat stuff you normally can't).
Better HRTF and simulation algorithms would allow you to directly generate audio based on geometry interactions, media density, temperature etc - instead of using all pre-recorded sounds and pre-defined characteristics (such as room size, simplified geometry for occlusion).
Think of it this way, in terms of video: We are rastering now, but we could ray-trace. We could even photon-map, conceivably.
Note: raytracing traces light away from the camera pixel by pixel, all the way to the source (unless constrained by simulation specifications). Photon mapping is different - it from sources, simulating their interactions until they either hit the camera or hit some other simulation constraint.
We could do similar stuff for audio. Might be a bit ridiculous, but still. It's probably more efficient space-wise to store/define characteristics of things and events, and let the system generate the rest.
Well... this got rambly. My point was there are things that can be done to audio that could be perceived by people.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
To me the real problem is focusing on the wrong details. Take Skyrim for example. Is it really a big thing if they, say, tripled the detail on the existing characters? Do the NPCs need pores or drops of sweat?
Or would it be more interesting to walk into Whiterun, and there's a 100 NPCs walking around, or you assault a fort with the Stormcloaks and there's 100 other soldiers at your side attacking the 100 Imperials in the fort, and clouds of arrows raining down [nice knowing ya, shieldless dual wielders :-) ]? It's a "more detailed objects" versus "more objects in the world" sort of argument, I guess. I'd rather see the power applied to "more objects" at this point, IMHO.
Well, that's what I get for not closing my anchor tag. Slashdot extended that URL to the whole phrase and lopped out some words while it was at it.
I meant to say it "simulates light emissions from sources"
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Most of us can no more imagine it now than some guy playing Pacman could have foreseen Half-Life 2. But it's coming.
The guy playing pacman (released in 1980) only had to move a couple cabinets over to play Battlezone (also released in 1980) to foresee Half Life 2 and FPS's in general.
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming.
And somewhere behind him is a woman throwing all of his stuff out of a bedroom window because he hasn't turned around from his gaming in 7 hours....
I8-D
For the humor impaired, this was an intentional parody of the moronic chain posts on Facebook, complete with terrible math, ambien-level hyperbolic drama, and random capitalization, inspired by the dumbass Facebook-post-esqe quoted paragraph.
You'd think I'd know better than to try a gag like this on Slashdot (or the internet in general) by now.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
It would be cheaper to hire a hooker.
I think main challenge is the interaction between player and environment. On something like MW3 that is limited to blowing up the odd chicken, window or set piece designed into game.
I want to swish my ( virtual ) hand through a river and see ( and feel ) the water flow around it.
Any true physics model would require awesome cpu capacity. We have at one end mindcraft ( where the atoms are decidely blocky ) and second life ( where behavioural programs can be attached to objects).
My dream would be a virtual universe with atoms large enough to fit 1000 times current cpu capacity but behaves like a 'real' experience.
By 'atom' i mean the simplist construct in this universe which satisfies greatest potential complexity but still cpu possible.
In conclusion future 'games' will not be about fps or polygons per sec but model calculations.
By using eye tracking, we dont really need to render the whole screen at high resolution.
We only need to render the part the eyes are looking at at high resolution
The ability of the eye to percieve high resolution is only limited to a very small area, and the brain fakes it by moving the eyes around.
By superimposing a small image with high dpi on top of a larger image with low dpi, we get a high resolution window into the larger image.
If this high res window follows the eyes around, the brain will percieve a large high resolution image.
Naturally for this to work, the smaller image has to be updated to show the same part of the scene that it is replacing.
This can also be used to emulate a high resolution screen by keeping an area your screen black, and using a projector to project the smaller high-dpi image on the black area.
Oh, and by the way. Remember this post and use it as prior art in case some troll patents "A method of simulating high resolution images by combining multiple images of different scales and resolution"
Nice theory, but in the days of Pacman, people COULD and DID envision a future with things like HL2. More realism was always and has always been the goal. The problem is now that we are getting to a point that many people consider to be "good enough," there is a lot of questioning as to what the future will hold. Most likely, the answer is a combination of incremental upgrades of realism coupled with increased focus on either a) marketing for big titles or b)different ways of thinking of gameplay, though even that concept doesn't really leave a whole lot of room. Most games are simply adding "with a computer" or "on the internet" to things that people have always wanted to do. The ideas of FPS for example are no different from the concepts of any action movie ever made, it just seeks to make the experience more immersive. As the tools mature, costs will become lower to implement and more focus can be put on quality story telling.
At the end of the day, that is what separates a game like HL2 or Mass Effect from a game like Angry Birds. You can make a great game in two ways. One is make something that is simply psychologically addictive and mind numbing that is good for mindless amusement or the other is to tell a great story in an immersive way. The most memorable games tend to be the ones with a great story that pulls you in. Saying that the direction of games will change drastically is like saying the direction of books will change drastically. They've been the same for thousands of years. Why? Because they work. They are immersive and tell a story people want to experience. Games are no different. Technology makes the media look different (e-books for example), but what makes them work doesn't change because people don't change.
AJ Henderson
Good enough does not mean that you have to match the anatomical limits of human perception. That is asking for perfection.
Unless the increase of graphics performance will lead to new radical ways of gaming, then the current GPU performance is good enough.
It is not like it was 10 years when 3D graphics opened the door to new types of gameplay, like the creation of Grand Theft Auto III. Now 3D gaming has matured and there isn't any more frontiers to discover other than just better graphics, which are just marginal improvements.
I am thinking innovation will come from input devices like touch screens, Kinects or another technology that no one has thought of yet.
And if that woman is his mother, that is a rally good thing.
Dwarf... Fortress... nuff said. People laughed, Toady did it anyway.
Here's a cookie... *psst* it's MAGIC
If developers can't find a way to improve games beyond the next generation, it's not because we've reached some peak of gaming possibilities, it's just because those particular developers have reached the peak of their imaginations.
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming. It will require a lot more computing power than the current generation of PC's, much less consoles. If he were to pitch it at EA, he would be laughed at. If he tried to explain it at a Game Developers Conference, he would be greeted by blank stares and derision. He's probably already used to hearing responses like "That can't be done", "Who would want THAT?", "That could never be done on a console", etc. But one day people will look back and say "Wow, how could they *not* have seen that that was the future?" and "How could they have been so arrogant as to think that gaming had peaked with the millionth variation of the FPS?".
I actually have an idea like this. I'll go ahead and practice my elevator pitch here:
Zombies have been a staple of FPS games since the beginning. You can't go much further back than Doom. But what makes a zombie scary?
It's not that they're undead. It's not that they're brainless, or that they can't always be killed. It's the numbers. A gamer can go one-on-one with anything. Look at how many JRPGs end with a boss fight against god, for crying out loud.
No game captures the sheer numbers of zombies. Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead, you'll see dozens on-screen, if that much.
I want millions. I want the entire population of New York City, all eight million people, turned into shambling, flesh-eating monsters. And I want the entire First Infantry Division there to fight them off. Real-time, with full AI. Minimum of thousands of people and un-people on screen at all times.
Now, we'll need a lot of CPU power for that. We'll have to make some sacrifices in the graphics department, and we'll need some *really* good programmers to optimize the hell out of it. Even then, we're beyond current tech, unless we cut it down to Doom-level graphics.
So start now. Give me a team, a small team, maybe two dozen or so people. Let us keep working at it until the technology catches up to us. 30 people working on a game for a decade costs the same as hiring 300 people to cram a game out in a year, and we'll give you better results.
Most of us can no more imagine it now than some guy playing Pacman could have foreseen Half-Life 2. But it's coming.
People still play Pac-Man today. Do you think anyone will be playing Half-Life 2 in 2036?
The truth is that game design has for the most part regressed since the NES/SNES era, focusing too much on flashy effects at the expense of gameplay, and dominated by one crappy genre (FPS). The only 3-D games I ever found worth playing were the Zelda series.
You probably couldn't tell much of a difference for a frame of a movie or 3d game, but given a choice between a 4000x2000 desktop display and a 8000x4000, I'd definitely go for the latter!
At the end of the day, that is what separates a game like HL2 or Mass Effect from a game like Angry Birds.
I can almost guarantee you that Angry Birds will stand the test of time far better than Half-Life 2 or Mass Effect. In fact, if there's one single game released in the past 5 years that will be considered a classic two or three decades from now, it's Angry Birds.
Well either way, a 2000 fold increase in power is about it. Ray tracing is a different memory problem than rasterization (more random memory grabs, less in order churning) but still much of the rest of it is basically the same. Lots of current rendering uses ray casting on a limited scale.
And even sweeny himself has ridden the ray tracing bandwagon, it is the future. But it's also expensive, so expect to have to have the transistors for it. a 2000 fold increase in power is only 6 generations of hardware, or, about a decade. Maybe a bit longer if things slow down a bit.
Also, realize that while a 2000 fold increase in power today is completely unrealistic for a home user. Buying 2 million dollars in graphics cards for research for an outfit like AMD, nVIDIA, epic games, or the like is not completely crazy, nor is it unrealistic for something like Pixar and those guys who are doing rendering professionally. In that situation you realize that a factor of 2000 more than exists today, and is available for use for professional grade users, it's just a matter of how long it takes for the price to come down. Probably 15 years or so.
Because raytracing uses so much less computing resources? Or, because you don't really know what it is?
For very complex scenes, yes it does use less resources. Raytracing grows logarithmically while Rasterization grows linearly. Intel estimates the scene complexity (whats visible) where Raytracing overtakes Rasterization is ~1 million polygons. After that, Rasterization has no chance to compete in efficiency.
"His name was James Damore."
I don't think so; if you read the first question out loud, he sounds Canadian.
Polite holocausts are the worst sort, eh.
Roughly expect a factor of 100 in 10 years. A factor of 16 in 6 more after that. So in 2018 figure 1600x the computing power of today, so by 2030 2000x the computing power in a home machine does not seem unreasonable.
But sweeny is also making some assumptions around requirements that won't come to pass necessarily as quickly as computing power will catch up. Things like how high resolution displays will be may lumber along a lot more slowly that computing power, because the infrastructure to deliver regular content to those displays may not be built as quickly as he'd like it to be. It's not that he's necessarily wrong about 8000x4000 displays, quite honestly that's doable more or less today, with an eyefinity setup (2 rows of four monitors will get you around there). I'm not sure there's much value in that though. The way we focus means we only look at a relatively narrow area, and that won't need to be 8x the pixel density of today to reach eye quality. Sure, if you want 2x the quality of today and your entire field of view maybe, but I'm not sure you'd get enough out of that for it to be worth it.
And anyway, all the steps from here to there will be pretty interesting.
Damn, now I'm all weepy thinking about my old Atari 1040ST, and playing Powermonger and Dungeon Master.
Sorry, let me clarify I didn't mean to imply that Angry Birds doesn't have staying power, but rather that there is more depth to the characters of a game like HL2. People who are Half Life fans are fans because of the story. People who are angry birds fans are fans because they hit the right balance of a simple mechanic with a likeable enough character that caught on culturally (in the same way giga-pets did). It will still be well remembered in the future, but how many people really wish for more gigapets now? Compare that to wishing for another game like X-wing Vs Tie Fighter (as a percentage of the niche they filled).
AJ Henderson
Very well-said, that was my thought on reading the summary. On the one hand, graphics have IMO been "good enough" since the voodoo cards came out, and I could play quake with opengl. But they keep making the hardware that can handle the data, so of course what we have now will be improved upon by 2000X. It looks great, but for the most part the fun units haven't gone up with the graphics detail. So, here's to some young guy (or girl) coming up with a new idea.
:)
And yes, every generation thinks it's special, but I'm a boomer, so for me that's actually true.
Best test for gaming AI...
Some day Xbox or PS will sell a multiplayer game, but simulate all the other players. When no one notices, I will say we have achieved the pinnacle of gaming AI. Of course we may have to train an AI to chronically swear and make racist slurs, but if that is what progress takes so be it!
It very much depends on the pixel density. Resolution doesn't always tell the whole story.
God forbid you ever encounter the paperback medium that you flip open to reveal a jumble of characters.
People value what they can measure.
People also value things we can't measure. Happiness, satisfaction, fun, love, laughter... you can't measure those.
Perhaps what you meant was people who value money above all else value only what they can measure. That would indeed be accurate.
Free Martian Whores!
If the CGI was bad and the characters were bad, what was good about the movie?
Noobs always say the graphics are as good as they can get and there will be no need for more powerful machines. And they are always wrong... They ignore history.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
I want millions. I want the entire population of New York City, all eight million people, turned into shambling, flesh-eating monsters. And I want the entire First Infantry Division there to fight them off. Real-time, with full AI. Minimum of thousands of people and un-people on screen at all times.
You can have 300-400 AI on a screen today in Mount&Blade, or a server with 150 humans fighting each other, all on the same map on your screen in front of you.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Ah, I overlooked that. Points for you and king neckbeard.
In any case, the point isn't about exploiting all the gaming capabilities of any particular hardware. It's that as hardware advances, there will be innovations that weren't imagined before because many people's thinking has been based on the constraints of today's (or yesterday's) hardware.
I agree that someone could possibly build a compelling new type of game on old hardware, but there are many interesting and worthwhile gaming things you could never do with a SNES. An engaging AI environment is one example that comes to my mind.
What about trying to make games that are actually fun to play and not only the best looking on the market. I mean, it's been a long time since I've played a FPS that I could even remotely compare to Half Life or Quake 3. Maybe Battelefield 3 comes close and it's miles ahead of the competition.
I mean, Trine is freaking good, Terraria is so fun, Minecraft is amazing, Angry birds was so good (now it's getting a bit repetitive), etc...
I know it's now Sweeney's job to do game design and it's good to have people work on the technical stuff because that's what made Minecraft possible now and not ten years ago. But still, the game industry is producing way too much crap. Thank god we still have some indie developers.
The uncanny valley probably has as much to do with art as it does technical, considering that even in offline rendered images the examples are pretty few where the valley is crossed. For actual moving video/animation, I'm not sure if there's even a single example?
We passed a million polygons on screen over a decade ago. Your telephone can just about do that today (the iPhone 4S does 30 million per second), modern game consoles that came out 7 years ago will do about ten times that (500 million per second on a 360), and a modern high-end PC probably does ten times that again.
In other words, we're at the point where we're using rasterization to push 100 million polygons, and raytracing is still so much slower that it's not even remotely practical to duplicate the same quality. Intel's latest attempts to do so have produced low-resolution low-quality results that still require a massive array of hardware. They're basically throwing eight PCs worth of hardware at the problem. About all the demos do is demonstrate that it's easier to calculate accurate reflection and refraction with raytracing.
In other words, you either mis-remembered Intel's estimate, or their estimate was laughably inaccurate.
I think you are 93% correct. Unfortunately, that is only 32% of the time.
Here's the thing, 20/20 vision means you can resolve about one arcminute or 1/60th of a degree. So 1920x1080 can cover up to 1920*1/60 = 32 degrees of your field of vision without you being able to see more detail. QFHD or 3840x2160 can cover 3840*1/60 = 64 degrees and 4K 4096*1/60 = 68 degrees. People don't actually want that for a normal movie, it's nauseating and disorienting. THX recommends that the worst seat in the theater has at least 36 degree viewing angle (with the absolute minimum to be THX certified 30 degrees), an ideal seat is somewhere in the 40s and max for the front row, which most people find way too close is about 52 degrees. If you see a site that talks like 36 degrees is ideal, they have no clue.
Of course, 20/20 is not actually perfect vision, only a cutoff for normal vision. Wikipedia says "When used as a screening test subjects that reach this level need no further investigation, even though the average visual acuity of healthy eyes is 20/16 to 20/12." So for 20/16 vision it's 4096*(16/20)/60 = 55 degrees and 20/12 it's 4096*(12/20)/60 = 41 degrees. So people with 20/12 vision sitting very close to a big screen can barely begin to resolve anything better than 4K, on the back row or with 20/15 vision you have no chance. To go to 8K is just absurdly overkill for the few percent with the sharpest sight sitting closest to huge cinema/home cinema screens. Note that the figures here are slightly inaccurate as you're watching a flat screen while the field of vision is a cone, but it's not off by enough to make a difference.
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Somewhere between orange and purple lies the true hue of a human.
Imagination has infinite resolution with eight billion times anti-aliasing.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
64k should be enough for anyone....
Actually, this was making me think of some of the games I have enjoyed, including Conan the Barbarian on an orange/brown and gray/black monochrome monitor back in the day....
Just for the record, do you also satirize the behaviour of five-year-olds in warm swimming pools with HD fidelity?
I don't wish to cultivate any emotion about Facebook. Here's a piece of satire I viewed yesterday as I finally got around to killing my local subversion: Hitler uses git. In the Voldemort aftermath, Linus pounded his fist on the table and declared he wouldn't touch the kernel again until he had a workable replacement. Some of us couldn't wait that long.
There's even a Facebook reference that was obvious to an old goat like me, for people who can't get the rest of the humour. I'm mildly amused by the movie about Facebook, which I'm eagerly awaiting to pop up in the discount rental racks. Any day now.
I think this whole article about petaflop gaming is a waste of electrons. The joy of petaflop gaming is that the game player can run their imagination at sub nano-Hertz clock cycles. Count me out.
I want millions. I want the entire population of New York City, all eight million people, turned into shambling, flesh-eating monsters.
Sounds like you haven't been to New York lately.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
HD (1920x1080) is *plenty* for 2D gaming. Or 2D movies. The next step of any interest at all is 3D, and that will indeed require more display bandwidth, but oddly enough, still about the same number of triangles -- gaming is (for 3d-ish titles) the process of converting a 3D map of the world into a 2D format. For real 3d displays (not the lame 2D stereo they're pawning of on us right now), the data is going to be very similar to what they're processing already, only the display hardware at the very end of the processing chain will have to change -- more polygons / triangles have to make it to the display hardware, but they're the same ones that have been in the models all along.
The next really big thing will be that true 3D display on your desktop. Speaking as someone who has, and really enjoys, 1920x1080, progressive, on a big screen, there's no "new hotness" that could entice me to step beyond that with just resolution.
But a real volumetric 3d display... and content... oh yeah, they can have my money for that. Right now.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The Wii controllers and Move/Kinect require more processing power (well, the Wii was more about inventing a nearly-free accelerometer). But the processing has improved so much that it wasn't considered an issue of power, but using the power well.
The next real innovation will be the two HD screens, one per eye, on a lightweight VR helmet giving optimal 3D and full 360 immersion (you could even call it the X-box 360!). Combine that with Kinect for the pure controllerless, immersive experience (at least once it can pick up your trigger finger so you don't have to use massive unnatural movements to take actions).
Learn to love Alaska
Backgrounds and machinery get rendered to the limits of technology (lately with a lot of showing off with reflection and glass effects) but the people are done as if it's movie quality cell animation of a few years ago. The automation is applied to inbetweening, hair effects etc but the people still look like cartoon characters and not a scary moving plastic robot pretending to be a person.
As far as fooling human perception, the calculations seemingly ignore 3 other senses. To be an immersive experience, you would probably have to fulfill those as well. Sensory is the big one obviously. Holding a gaming controller is a pretty big block to me as far as "realism." Hopefully something like this - http://www.virtusphere.ca/ will come down in price. Might get me off the couch too.
really, the ideal endgame for monitors is for it to curve around most of your field of vision, have a resolution high enough that you cant distinguish individual pixels, and have the best possible contrast and color gamut. and have eye tracking 3d. thats about as good as you want, barring a volumetric display.
If the CGI was bad and the characters were bad, what was good about the movie?
It was politically correct to watch the movie due to the portrayal of a disadvantaged minority as the focus of the story.
That said, I think the Tuskegee Airmen certainly deserve any sort of kudos or honors accorded to them for their service, but the point of the movie was to be politically correct. That isn't a great way to start writing a script.
The problem with VR was and still is the fact that your eyes and ears are telling you that you are moving forward but other parts of your body (especially the balance organs in your ear) are telling you you are not. This screws up your brain in various ways and leads to headaches and other things IIRC (I am not an expert so I dont know exactly what symptoms it causes)
Just look at any PC version of a game compared to a console, its like night and day...
There is a lot of fancy lighting and shadows that just can't be done(on consoles), but the big difference is draw distance and at what distance each item degrade to a low-rez version.
And that not even starting on the rez differences. e.g. I use 3x24" in portrait, 3600x1920 make a huge difference over 1920x1080, and games on consoles don't render at native rez anyway, not even close. i.e. Halo 3/ODST ran at 640p(on the xbox 360).
As long as money can be made consoles will be released; the only question is will your phone be better and cheaper, and make more money?
Most hi-end phones next year will have 1080p displays...
Not much if any more than they do now, considering game engine development is a fixed cost. The only reason game engines become "obsolete" is because technology advances. There's nothing stopping someone from taking the Quake 3 engine today and making a game from it, only concentrating on the game/storyline, and not having to worry (much) about the 3d engine stuff.
Most of us can no more imagine it now than some guy playing Pacman could have foreseen Half-Life 2. But it's coming.
As teenager playing PacMan, I have foreseen much more impressive games than HL2. I regularly imagine video games that are indistiguishable from reality when it comes to graphics and physics.
As for the limitations of physics regarding video hardware, the human brain can sythesize incredibly realistic images during dreaming. When we dream, we often see images we have never seen before, which are on par with reality. This means the human brain is the best rendering engine there is, so computers still have a very long way to go.
What was the game you have played? I had played one with 1st world war biplanes. I do not remember the name, but it was the most virtual gaming experience i ever had. I could move my head and watch the surroundings, the other planes coming in from different angles, etc. I could raise my head and view the sun and the horizon! it was amazing, even if the graphics were truly primitive. I think it was around 1992.
With rasterization everything depends on the efficiency and accuracy of the invisible geometry culling algorithms. If all you have left is a visible primitives set then rasterization is _always_ going to be faster because you are then looking at constant time rendering (per pixel). In realtime graphics we can use the scene's spacial coherence to to amortize time spent in geometry sorting and culling algorithms over multiple frames. Ray casting/tracing doesn't look so good then. Where ray tracing really shines is stuff where rasterization basically fails: dynamic global illumination, shadowing, reflection, refraction etc. So for really high quality dynamic scenes rasterization is unusable. Because of that we will eventually simply _need_ to start ray tracing to gain image quality, not because it is faster (which it is not).
The article mentions that at a resolution of 8000x4000 you need a triangle rate of at most 40 billion triangles per second to render your scene perfectly quoting the shannon sampling theorem. Probably I'm just missing something here but how does he arrive at that number?
I'm guessing he argues that you have to process 8000*4000*72FPS=2.3 billion pixels per second and the smallest possible triangle would be 1 pixel sized, so that you need a triangle rate of at most 2.3 billion/sec.
Now there are two levels of sampling going on here. First you use triangles to sample reality (not actually a sampling more an approximation) and then you sample those triangles with the pixels on your screen. The shannon theorem says that with a maximum bandwith/max. frequency in your scene of fmax you need at most a sample rate of 2*fmax. The resolution then gives you maximum frequencies of 1/4000 in one direction and 1/2000 in the other. These are the highest frequencies you can sample in your scene. With the triangles you can now approximate these frequencies, which will always give an infinite bandwidth (i.e. spectrum of a saw tooth function). To perfectly approximate these frequencies you need an infinite number of triangles but it doesn't make sense to make them smaller than 1 pixel.
I mean, basically you don't even need Shannon here, it's 1 pixel =1 triangle, right?
So how does he get from 2.3 to 40 billion?
... the same guy that predicted 3D hardware would be "obsolete" by 2004-2005, it's 2012 and 3D hardware has been implemented in all major consoles for and will be for the foreseeable future.
The worst part about these talks is they don't talk about memory bandwidth - which is a huge roadblock to how fast anything can go. The last 2-3 generations of video cards (and cpu's too) the increase in performance has been getting smaller and smaller beause of fundamental advances in other areas (memory) aren't going anywhere near fast enough to keep the pace.
Sweeny shouldn't talk about hardware since he's a programmer and he's made countless foolish predictions before. The fact that he doesn't see the memory crisis that anyone in the hardware business knows about just shows volumes about how much he doesn't know.
Indeed, which is why I assumed 30FPS and said that an iPhone would just about do a million (30/30=1). The point isn't necessarily the theoretical numbers; if you've got a theoretical performance of 500 million polys, that's enough for ~17 million per frame, and drop that down to practical and you're still over a million. And this console came out seven years ago. Is "a decade ago" an exaggeration? Perhaps, but the hardware we're doing it on today is seven years old.
To me the real problem is focusing on the wrong details. Take Skyrim for example. Is it really a big thing if they, say, tripled the detail on the existing characters? Do the NPCs need pores or drops of sweat? Or would it be more interesting to walk into Whiterun, and there's a 100 NPCs walking around, or you assault a fort with the Stormcloaks and there's 100 other soldiers at your side attacking the 100 Imperials in the fort, and clouds of arrows raining down [nice knowing ya, shieldless dual wielders :-) ]? It's a "more detailed objects" versus "more objects in the world" sort of argument, I guess. I'd rather see the power applied to "more objects" at this point, IMHO.
No, actually they are not. I had dabbled a lot with 3D in 2007/2008 and I can tell you no engine whatsoever delivers accurate foliage.
What state of the art engines do is return a good approximation by filtering obstructed objects out of computation. Transforms are not
live and lighting is a very rough estimate, ignoring subsurface scattering and calculating shadows out of a reduced mesh.
Want to go even further? Fur and then cloth. Fur atm is non existent in real time engines (to create real tangible fur in a Max scene can introduce thousandfold increases in computation) and don't even get me started about cloth.
So yes, graphics hardware isn't anywhere near a plateau. The 5000fold estimate is a reasonable one if not optimistic. IMO hardware will continue to leap forward untill state of the art processing will be able to simulate realtime physics of high density meshes by just knowing the material properties of each mesh (which has never been as much as suggested).
As for displays, those will keep growing both in physical dimensions and resolution because there just are uses for that (and before anybody argues think how many people thought `17" 1024x768 is all you need`)
If you have absolutely no money, well, sucks to be you? Sorry, but in a world where people spend 1000 bucks on a TV, 25000 on cars etc. etc. etc. High Quality Wallpapers 500 dollars in disposable income on a console, which lasts for 5 years is targeting anyone who makes 35K/year or more. It's not perfect, but what else do you expect? We're not going to resell PS2's for 30 bucks here. There are about 100 million consoles sold at the price point of 700-300 dollars (launch price to current price), which is a pretty wide distribution given that not everyone even likes games, and lots of consoles serve a lot more than 1 person.
Sure, if you don't live in a first world country consoles are insanely expensive, no doubt, but then you'd have a stratification of consoles for the 2nd and third world and consoles for the first world, since people who *can* spend 500 bucks on a console will want a better experience than you're griping about at 50.
With 20:10 vision, 8X4K resolution would be over kill for a 60" screen for photographic realism. 4000 dpi, or pixels will give photographic detail matching super fine grain film in a 35mm camera when the image is blown up to well past 16 X 20 inches. I have to admit setting between to 60 inchers running at less than half that resolution would be almost overwhelming. The challenge is not the number of pixels, but realistic movement for that many pixels.