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Rendering a Frame of Deus Ex: Human Revolution
An anonymous reader writes "Video games are among the most computationally intensive applications. The amount of calculation achieved in a few milliseconds can sometimes be mind-blowing. This post about the breakdown of a frame rendering in Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes us through the different steps of the process. It explains in detail the rendering passes involved, the techniques as well as the algorithms processed by a computer — 60 times per second."
No multiplayer, yet critics praise the game's social interaction. Critics are on crack, and they pay for that crack with good reviews, the shameless whores.
Right, it's not an interesting technical problem to render a scene with lots of interesting lighting effects. No one would ever want to read about that, because game play is more important.
The page is particularly annoying, especially the frame autoplay which gives strictly no control to the viewer to shorten the delay between the rendering stage... Too bad a website fails to pass its message due to a piss poor implementation...
A person can be enthusiastic about games and spend time and money on buying games, playing games, reading about games, and thinking about games, and yet that person will never be a gamer, unless that person is obsessed with graphics. Because gamer doesn't mean gamer. Gamer means elitist graphics nerd.
Let's outsource the boss fights.
Omg I've landed on you tubes comments pages - and to think I thought I was being linked to a tech site
Didn't know it takes that much to render the inside of vents.
That game was played by finding vents and going through them.
The police station mission was cool but the rest, vents, and more vents.
The best part? All that rendering and the game still looks like shit. Probably has to due with too much brown and too many objects (like the weapon) being bland metallic round.
Unless you talk to those that are interested in competitive games. Then you get called a non-gamer if you have anything above the bare minimum.
Over 500 draw calls per frame. I've only ever tinkered in basic OpenGL stuff, but does that seem like an awful lot to anyone else? I was always told to reduce draw calls and to use the newer OpenGL features as they were able to batch commands on thousands of vectors, etc. (or are we talking about different types of draw calls?)
Especially as a lot of the work is done in shaders and shared between passes according to the article?
Wonder what kind of texture etc. bandwidth that's pushing.
Video games are among the most computationally intensive applications.
On a desktop machine. I would say you earn the "amont the most computationally intensive" badge if your calculation needs 2048 cores or so to become practical.
People who work on games will find it interesting. I know I did.
I almost never run anything at 60fps. Saying you need it that fast is like saying you need gold plated ethernet cables to connect your stereo components or you can hear distortion.
Gameplay? You think games are about gameplay? Stoner! Your type may finance my hobby but my love for shaders, polygons, wearable displays, and GPUs defies your petty indulgences. Rendering is where money intersects with math. It's cocaine for nerds. Fucking "gameplay", are you kidding me?
I'd have more sympathy with you if the new-releases list on Steam these days wasn't completely buried by "retro 8-bit style" indie roguelikes which look dreadful and usually play that way as well.
These days, I've gone beyond "it's not the graphics that matter, it's the gameplay" to "they both matter, seriously". The former has become a go-to excuse for lazy development.
This is Deus Ex we are talking about so the gameplay is good by definition. Even the shitty Invisible War was better than most of other similar games of the period.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Pretty sure quantitative analysis is where money intersects with math.
Gameplay is king, but the game mechanics are relatively trivial to write.
Graphics are fluff but damn there's some serious engineering involved.
Ha, good point! I didn't think IW was that good yet I played it to completion (which I don't do very often with games) so it must have been good enough.
The problem, other than the console-itis, was that the original DE was SOOOO good, it would have been hard to step into those shoes.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Video games are among the most computationally intensive applications
This is a joke right? Simulating fluid dynamics, simulating weather patterns, finding large primes, factoring primes, etc. are all far more computationally intensive. And that isn't even close to an exhaustive list. Rendering a video game is kiddy stuff in comparison.
I have to agree- especially with all the low cost or free (as in beer to an extent) engines out there now, too many games seem to be going the 2D 8 bit style. Even the 2D can be ok, but at least spend a little more effort to make some HD graphics. A lot of late nineties flash games had better graphics.
well that and the bugs.
pretty crappy though that it had console-itis, yet was slow on computers vastly more powerful than the xbox.
still, played it through... but the inventory system.. damn.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Suck on my massively rendered dick!
[rend]
verb (used with object), rent, rending.
1. to separate into parts with force or violence:
*cringe*
Poor guy will get another beating.
I love reading this stuff. I remember, back in the days of Amigas and Atari STs where I cut my 3D-programming teeth, it was a struggle simply to render each pixel of the frame buffer once, even at a juddery 10fps. Shadow maps! Bloom effects! Even the supercomputers couldn't do this stuff in my day, or would take hours of rendering time. A little bit sad that I left this world just as computer power started to make it interesting. Mind you, I think the most impressive 3D game of all time, in terms of getting the maximum from the minimum hardware, is still Revs for the BBC Micro. How Geoff managed to get that little old machine to render solid 3D I do not know.
I've seen this complaint often, but I don't get it. Do you complain that your chess pieces don't convincingly imitate actual peasants and aristocrats? Or that your monopoly board isn't really an immersive cityscape? The resolution of the game pieces need only to be detailed enough to communicate what they are and how they can be used. Anything more is just flavor. Flavor is nice for immersion, but hardly indispensable.
That would be "rended". Rendered is something different: molten, melted.
"Arborea was covered in several Amiga magazines, which predictably focused on the graphics, sound, and music rather than the actual gameplay elements. (The May 1991 review from CU Amiga begins by giving thanks that "the days [are gone] when a role-playing game meant little more than a great leap of the imagination, a plot with trolls and gameplay along the lines of a special maths paper." You want to know when RPGs started getting "dumbed down"? This is it, right here.)"
-- The CRPG Addict, http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
And yet... I have had masses of fun over the last 6 months with Farcry 4, Dragon Age 3, Alien Isolation and Forza Horizon 2. Big, AAA technical-powerhouse games. And all of them more enjoyable than anything I've seen come out of the indie-sector.
It is a commonly-held myth - but a myth nonetheless - that good graphics and good gameplay are mutually exclusive.
Graphics contribute to gameplay. How fun and immersive do you think Deus Ex would be if it were done with Atari 2600 graphics?
Answer: Not very.
Invisible War had good stealth gameplay, but they fucked up on the rest. Universal ammo was just idiotic, the non-permanent biomods meant players never had to make any real choice and the tiny maps meant almost constant load screens (you can thank the crap controllers, low IQ demographics and specs of consoles for those).
Invisible War is at least worth a playthrough for the story.
Back in my day, emacs contained systemd, or at least all of its useful functionality.
Now, Get The Fuck Off My Linux, systemd!
Have you played Samurai Gunn ?
No, but I just looked at its Steam page and it looks like yet another pseudo-8-bit sprite art game. Local multiplayer oriented... no singleplayer to speak of and, looking at the trailer, nothing particular gripping about the concept either. Not interested.
I'll stick to Farcry 4 and Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters for now, until Bloodborne comes out in a couple of weeks.
Indeed, a fine candidate for the GNAA. Great article though - a rare event on slashdot. It should be taken more seriously.
-jcr
No that would be renderdick. Gameplay for you and your boyfriend. Fuck gayming. It's nothing but a shitwad of violence. You friggin douchebags should go play army for real and then if you survive get a life. You might actually be a productive member of society one day instead of worrying about your fantasy role playing scores. Douchebags.
Pretty amazing, Really. But why does it still look worse then a modded eldersign? Now that is so impressing shit. Also, who stole all the colors? The death of PC gaming was herald by brown and tan in every game.
But you know what would be a lot better than the graphics in those games? If they had bothered to fix bugs and performance issues. Or bothered to make them fun.
They might not have sacrificed game-play for graphics in all of them (debatable), but they definitely sacrificed stability, performance, interesting characters, and immersion in other ways. Farcry 4 has frame rate drops on a Titan Black, and is essentially the same game as farcry 3. I call that a sacrifice, no improvements to the game style? Still full of empty useless characters? Same boring shit. Watchdogs sacrificed huge amounts of the original gameplay ideas so they could work on their stupid graphics engine.
Dragon Age Inquisition has a shit quest system that basically mimics the nonsense from World of Warcraft. "Go get me X items," and that is because they spent so much time building a giant graphically impressive open world that they didn't have time to actually make something interesting to fill it with. Fucking boring, stupid shit.
I've had far more fun with Wasteland 2, which looks like a top down game from the late 90s, than with any of the big budget games I've played in a long time.
It looks like a shitty Teeworlds rip-off. Why pay for something like that when Teeworlds is free, open source and a better game?
Modern day video games are a lot more complex than Chess. Chess also doesn't try to put players into another world, it's just a simple, strategic board game.