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Unigine's Newest Benchmark Features Huge, Open-Space Expanses
jones_supa writes "Unigine announced a new GPU benchmark known as Valley Benchmark. From the same developers who created Heaven Benchmark, the Valley Benchmark is a non-synthetic benchmark that is powered by the Unigine Engine, a real-time 3D engine that supports the latest rendering features. The Valley Benchmark includes massive area of 64 square kilometers of very detailed terrain that includes forest, mountains, green expanses, rocky slopes and flowers. The area can be freely explored by means of walking or flying. All major operating systems are supported."
Are here under Fedora.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
All they have to do is rename it The Elder Scrolls VI and they have themselves a finished game.
Better known as 318230.
-Instancing: For drawing lots of trees without draw call overhead.
-Impostors: For the groups of trees far away
-Vertex Program: For the sway of the trees, probably with per vertex amount of strength
-PSSM: For the shadows
-Godrays: For the sunrays through the trees
-HDR+Bloom with luminance bleeding: For the lighting and skybox
-Instanced Particles: For the clouds
I sure am forgetting some of them, but I think this demo, with huge amounts of instancing, is mainly designed to stress the vertex pipeline of modern videocard.
A bit of an oversight - it won't run if security is set to reject unknown developers.
http://burnedchips.com/results.jpg
not to shabby for a 2009 budget box
The still scenes on thier website are really nice, some the most detailed and realistic renders from a game engine I've ever seen.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
-Godrays: For the sunrays through the trees
Nitpick: that's not a technique. Those rays of light are called godrays, it says nothing about the implementation technique.
I sure am forgetting some of them, but I think this demo, with huge amounts of instancing, is mainly designed to stress the vertex pipeline of modern videocard.
I checked out the YouTube - video and, well, I see huge amounts of people complaining about the apparently-poor texture resolution of this benchmark. IMHO, these people are missing the whole point of the demo as the demo is not intended to show exceedingly impressive textures or such. The speeds at which the engine can manage to do so beautiful real-time shadows and lighting, huge, open landscape with loads of foliage, the impressively realistic fogging in certain areas and so on, these are the focus here. I certainly would trade some texture resolution for more realistic lighting and environmental effects in games if it ever came to such a choice.
What did they hide in the valley. Has anyone found anything weird/interesting?
... as well as Linux.
(quickly ducks....)
I think this demo, with huge amounts of instancing, is mainly designed to stress the vertex pipeline of modern videocard.
It actually uses quite a lot of LOD -- even at the highest settings there aren't ever very many triangles on screen. As TFS says, this isn't meant to be a synthetic benchmark. It's not made to stress any one specific thing, and it really doesn't.
Some of the tech it is demoing is pretty cool, even if the resulting image isn't very impressive. In the hands of proper designers, this stuff could be awesome.
Since when did Linux count as a "major operating system"?
(I kid, I kid - it's just odd that a) they support it and b) the summary doesn't mention it specifically, given that this is /.)
Impressive enough, it's always neat to see even programming as utterly performance intensive as a game engine pay off with something so pretty.
> Nitpick: that's not a technique. Those rays of light are called godrays, it says nothing about the implementation technique.
Indeed. They could be using "Volumetric Light", "Occlusion Stencil", or as a post-process in Screen Space. Hard to tell which algorithm they are using.
Reference:
* http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch13.html
Nice. Reminds me of Speedtree's demos.
The speeds at which the engine can manage to do so beautiful real-time shadows and lighting, huge, open landscape with loads of foliage, the impressively realistic fogging in certain areas and so on, these are the focus here.
Nitpick: The benchmark misses the point of benchmarks. I mean, instancing is fine, but why include a trick like "imposters" to give the illusion of the visuals being more complex than they are if you're trying to stress the hardware. Seems counter productive to me. I mean, if you're going to make a game, fine, you want it to run great on lesser end hardware, but why make a benchmark that emulates game behaviors? If you want more accurate "real world" use cases, why not just benchmark with existing games on different hardware?
::yawn:: So, it's not a "benchmark" -- it's a tech demo of what you can do with the Unreal Engine?
Never disturb my slumber again. . ..zzZ Z Z
Read again, not Unreal Engine - Unigine Engine.
Patience is a virtue, but haste is my life.
It's just a model.
It's propably you wo misses the point. The idea is to bench a realistical workload. Since techniques for replacing far away objects are used in almost every game it makes perfect to include it. Besides, you could not render such scenes without it in real time
Or you could go with neither and have hundreds of square kilometers of rock/concrete texture *Cough*MassEffect*Cough*
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
Set 1920x1080 fullscreen video mode
X Error of failed request: GLXBadFBConfig
Major opcode of failed request: 154 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 34 ()
Serial number of failed request: 50
Current serial number in output stream: 49
AL lib: ReleaseALC: 1 device not closed
Any ideas?
FPS in games can vary a lot depending on scenery and things going on.
I wonder if the results here can actually be compared without everyone using a predefined path for the camera to fly along.
You really have to make a new engine from scratch emulating what game developers would do to test the video cards. After all, instancing is a part which stresses the hardware, if you are not using instancing, what hardware are you actually testing? And if you tested just raw polygons, wouldn't you be avoiding the use of most silicon which got developed precisely for these other "tricks"?
Very nice. But I'm really curious: why do video sims have this obsession with pretending to be shot on a physical camera (e.g. rain drops on the "lens", lens flare when looking at the sun)?
I understand it's an aesthetic but it comes over as insecurity: "hey I bet you couldn't tell this wasn't a real camera in a real world". I think sim designers should have more confidence and get over this 'trying to prove we're as good as the real world by simulating failings in cameras'. I think there's some really nice work and they should concentrate on improving their presentation of world rather than trying to reverse engineer the failings of old cameras.
Rain drops on the lens from video shot on real cameras is really annoying. Don't spend energy trying to simulate it, or lens flare. Spend your time improving your new format, do cool stuff the real film makers can't do and take advantage that you're not bound by their limitations. Please don't work on a virtual camera operator's hand cleaning your virtual lens with a virtual disposable tissue when it rains hard....
LOL.
you forgot
-Laggy non gradient detail POPUP: for when you just need to hide grass at a fixed level and look like 5 year old x360/PS3 game
-Microshutter: Why display smooth animation if we can "optimize" code and squeeze few more frames at the cost of consistency.
-Display fixed average fps: least useful number instead of a graph, we dont want to expose our shortcomings.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
would love to see this video's 2003, 1993 equivalent.. any good archives of graphics demos around?
mineral rights to that place? It would look so pretty with a big 'ol pipeline running across it!
Must admit, things like lens flare and rain on the lens make it look *less* realistic to me. Don't simulate what a camera would see, but what a human eye would see. I want to see a virtual world as if I was right there, not watching a nature documentary.
Hope that this could be turned into a non-violent game, a little like "Dear Esther", where you can just walk around and enjoy the scenery. It is now 64 square kilometer, but I guess that with generative techniques you could create virtually infinite worlds.
Yeah, just show it as it is, without annoying things like depth of field or motion blur, or the above-mentioned things.
how is not a synthetic benchmark though? until they got a game going in their game engine it's synthetic demo.. doesn't matter if they realtime generate lot of the stuff.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The thing that impresses me the most is the way that whoever put it together actually knows some geology and biology. The trees, other plants, and rocks are realistically placed. I admit it's kind of geeky, but as a geologist it always bothers me when game designers think any old "random pile of rocks" or "randomly bumpy cliff surface" corresponds to the way geological materials behave in the real world. Same for the shape of mountainsides. They are not randomly steep, planar slopes. Most of them have a graceful exponential kind of curvature. There are similar issues for the distribution of real plants and trees.
If the whole point of a game is to immerse you in an alternate reality, but everything in the "natural" world looks (to the experienced eye) like the building equivalent of walking through a funhouse, it kind of spoils the effect. These people are meticulously observant of nature and actually know what they are doing! Kudos.
why use such crap effects?
well, for same reason some movies use them when they could avoid them. you can get away with less actual detail in the scene.
why do you think so many games nowadays use focal effects? well duh.. it used to be common technique to just limit angle of camera to scene in games.. you don't have to draw the sky if you can never look at it. the focal focus shit effect used in so many games nowadays is usually used to blur backgrounds into blur.. like used in some movies to make the painted backgrounds not look totally shit. then you can use more polys in games on the characters in front.
and then you can just focus on all these shit tricks and forget the story like in dragon age II..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
well they have already faked the real world. might as well go all the way...
Regardless of all of that, I thought it looked wonderful (from the YouTube video). I especially liked the rain effects and the lighting when it was raining. The water running off the rocks was pretty cool too. My engine is around 10 years behind that (!), mostly because I don't work on it full time.
While I agree to some extent to what you are saying, I believe that sometimes it is desired to deliver that cinematic experience. Also directors can eliminate lens flares and motion blurs during shootings with the right set of lightings and aperture times but they don't. The reason for that is that they want to emphasize that something is extremely bright or is moving extremely fast. All this is part of cinematic storytelling. Something modern digital cameras such as the over-hyped Red(tm) cameras are lacking considerably compared to traditional film cameras that have been tweaked for over half a century.
Any professional cinematographer or photographer can almost always avoid lens flare, mist or water on the lens, but use it intentionally to convey things that the (audio)visual medium can't: heat and glare of bright lights, the sensation of cold wetness when you emerge from water or are caught out in the rain.
It can certainly be overdone, but used right it's just another tool to tell a multisensory story with pictures.
I believe the terrain was pulled from GIS data, (the article mentions the creators wanting to show off some of Russia's natural beauty) and the article says they procedurally placed the foliage and rocks, so Its all the work of very well designed math problems. But you are right, they did seem to do a meticulous job getting those math problems to reflect natural patterns.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
in the mid 90's using Vista Pro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6gOygLDaww Talk about a benchmark, each frame would take almost half an hour
Rain drops on the lens from video shot on real cameras is really annoying
Heh. You clearly don't wear glasses. Raindrops on the lens is absolutely normal to me, so it doesn't seem even slightly out of place when I see it in a game.
I agree that lens flare is annoying, though.
Anyone got a comparison?
It still gets a lot of pop-up though. Most engines seem to have this problem where everything far away is okay and every up close is okay, but in the middle ground things just pop into existence and look terrible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's worse in 1st person games where you are supposed to be looking through the characters eyes, and yet you still get droplet splashes and lens flair effects (I'm looking at you, MW3).
To be fair I do get the droplets on my glasses sometimes, but then again I'm not a cool uber-l33t soldier dude who would undoubtedly wear contact lenses.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Quite right! It seems synthetic to me as well.
If it generates geometry on the GPU, by using a geometry shader, it makes you wonder:
Do the trees have a physics representation on the CPU as well, so that the player collides with them?
Probably not, which means that despite the marvel of all those trees, you cannot play it like you can a Skyrim world.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
I did this landscape by a process called "procedural generation":
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-lPWscdDzXM8/TjtfFx12uRI/AAAAAAAACqc/gIukXZ8t0Sc/s1600/TerrainFracta+2l.jpg
Rather than place hills and grass individually, it uses fractal formulas to create the shapes and textures. The formulas and textures are height and slope aware, and it uses atmospheric haze to give a distance effect. The software is E-on Vue, which is used in professional movie making, but I just diddled around with it for fun.
Randomly generated simplistic mountainous landscapes have been done for years. The Unigine people are not exactly known for the quality of their engine. Take the latest demo.
1) No shadows cast by the land. Indeed, the contour of the horizon isn't tracked by the ray engine that casts shadows from the trees. Move the time slider till the sun is clearly below the horizon, and the trees around you are still casting shadows as if THEY see the sun.
2) There is a major bug is the 'simple' shadow casting. Go to a high spot. Move the time of day to near sundown. Watch how the tree shadows in the distant valley suddenly go wrong as the geometry calculations suddenly use the wrong part of the shadow texture buffer.
3) Lousy lighting model. Of late, it is remarkable how realistic outdoor lighting models have become. Even the Unreal 3 engine now has killer colour quality. This demo seems to think time-of-day lighting is a matter of massive bloom, and white/red saturation. The people involved obvious NEVER read any of the papers available describing the methods to correctly light an outdoor environment.
4) Indescribably lazy 'walk' movement algorithm. OK, this is a minor point, but such code is trivial, and everyone using the demo is going to want to walk through the environment. The model invented by id (where the mouse moves a virtual set of eyes with correct half-hemisphere 'freedom') and the cursor keys move one forward, back and sideways, obviously needed 'reinventing'. After rotating 720 degrees or so, you 'LOCK'. Half the time you cannot look 'up'. This is amateur coding of the like I have never experienced before.
5) No ground water. Unbelievable.
6) No advanced ground texture algorithm. Given the limited types of vegetation (rendered with soft sprites when close enough), there should have been flat ground textures available that made an effort to match the various types of cover, for when the ground was too distant to waste effort rendering the cover. Otherwise, as you approach a distant area, its 'nature' changes when the cover starts to 'pop' in.
7) Poor distant tree sprites.
Let me make this easier. Go seek out the game 'Just Cause 2". This masterpiece was built years ago by Scandinavian 'hackers' and shows just how perfectly an infinitely larger, and more varied open-world can be rendered. JC2 has to run on the prehistoric hardware of the Xbox360, not cutting edge PC systems as does 'the Valley'. By comparison, 'The Valley is 10+ years behind what JC2 did 3+ years ago!
JC2 has a vastly better day/night cycle with much better lighting. Its land actually casts a correct shadow. JC2 combines woods, deserts, rivers, seas, towns, villages, snowy landscapes, cities, etc in a seamless environment. Yes, you can stand on the tallest peak in the game, and look out for tens of miles in all directions.
As a benchmark, 'The Valley' is using rendering techniques that have been obsolete for more than 5 years.But the demo is sold as a professional product, not some amateur-hour knock-out by kids working for a term at uni. Given just how little 'The Valley' actually does, it would have been nice to have seen at least some attempt at innovation in rendering. However, even if that had been beyond the maths skills of the programmers, they could have tried to create a more 'complex' environment, with 'nature correct' randomly generated streams and pools. I'm honestly lost to see even one good thing the designers of this demo tried to bring.
.. on Linux (Debian Wheezy amd64), SandyBridge i5-2410 based Intel HD 3000 graphics:
GLRender::require_extension(): required extension GL_ARB_draw_instanced is not supported
and sure enough:
$ glxinfo | grep -i GL_ARB_draw
GL_APPLE_vertex_array_object, GL_ARB_draw_buffers,
GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex, GL_ARB_explicit_attrib_location,
When someone posts a torrent on slashdot.
GENERATION 9882463: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig & add a random number to the generation.
And when water gets in his eyes he'll blink and close. Yes that would definitely be less annoying.
I'm supposed to be there, I'm not supposed to be looking at things from a camera, get this right once and for all.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Must admit, things like lens flare and rain on the lens make it look *less* realistic to me. Don't simulate what a camera would see, but what a human eye would see. I want to see a virtual world as if I was right there, not watching a nature documentary.
Like occasionally blacking out for a frame or two because the eye virtually blinked? Hey, that could provide a slight FPS boost by not having to render those frames ;)