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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."
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.
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
It stops if you mouse over it.
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.
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.
People who work on games will find it interesting. I know I did.
So you can't tell the difference between movie and home video? Source for you, in a any case:
http://www.100fps.com/how_many...
Whatever floats your boat: I can personally see difference of 60fps to less, and I quite like 60fps.
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.
What's annoying is that none of these sites seem to give a straight answer to how many frames per second we can actually distinguish. Yes, even an extremely short flicker of light is detectable but can we notice the difference between a 60 fps and 250 fps video? Here's my proposal:
1. Get some *extremely high* fps footage, for example the Phantom Flex4K can do 1000 fps for 5 seconds.
2. Make interpolations that play at normal speed, like:
7 -> 1 frame for 142.8 fps
8 -> 1 frame for 125 fps
10 -> 1 frame for 100 fps
12 -> 1 frame for 83.3 fps
14 -> 1 frame for 71.4 fps
16 -> 1 frame for 62.5 fps
20 -> 1 frame for 50 fps
25 -> 1 frame for 40 fps
32 -> 1 frame for 31.3 fps
40 -> 1 frame for 25 fps
3. Do blind A/B tests on a 144 Hz gaming monitor set to match the video frequency. When do you stop being able to tell the difference? That's the frame rate you need to be visually transparent.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
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!
Can I tell the difference between 60 and 250? Absolutely. Heck, I can tell the difference between 60 and 75 fps, and can identify a frame rate below 100 pretty readily if things onscreen are moving quickly. (...) When I was gaming regularly, I couldn't stand playing at less than 100 fps.
Games don't have natural motion blur, if I throw a ball in front of the camera it'll travel during the 1/24th second and leave a smear while a game rendered at 24 fps will have the ball jump in discrete steps like filmed with a strobe light. The easiest way to fix that is to render more frames so the steps become smaller and a better approximation to reality's infinitely smooth motion. What you're measuring isn't how important the frame rate is for the display, but how important the sampling speed is for the simulation. For example if you modeled a realistic camera flash you'd probably need to render at 1000+ FPS to catch the flash going off. Of course that would be a stupid way of doing it, but that's why fps in games don't really say anything about how many fps you need for video.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Context matters a lot here. When I see a good frame in a game, I am not moving so everything looks great. But that's for the sort of games I have. 30fps is definitely good enough for lots of things, in an MMO 15fps is probably good. However I guess for testosterone fueled shooter games that higher FPS makes a difference just because the view point is changing so rapidly.
Basically I can't see the problem with 15-20fps unless I take the mouse and jiggle it back and forth rapidly, which is something never done in the games I play. But for those kids on the shooters they do that all the time, but then they're spending tons more on their computers than I would ever dream of.
A big problem is lack of motion blur there, not necessarily the frame rate. Which is why TVs could run at a slower frame rate and with interlacing and you'd rarely notice it unless it was a fast paced sports game. But in a game the realism is just not at the point where the frame rate should matter, the extra realism isn't present even in a still frame. A bigger problem for me is hitching, which has nothing to do with frame rate but I have noticed online that a lot of players confuse hitching with having a substandard video card.
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.
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.