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."

Comments

Re:forget the gameplay!

[beelsebob]

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.

Re: forget the gameplay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Omg I've landed on you tubes comments pages - and to think I thought I was being linked to a tech site

Vents

[ehiris]

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.

Re:Vents

[Coren22]

I guess it all depends on your play style. I spent nearly no rime in vents, but I prefer combat.

Wow

[ledow]

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.

Re:Wow

[fleeped]

No, 500 draw calls per frame is not *that* much. The majority of the calls are for different materials: For your toy project, that won't be a lot. For an AAA title, it's more like hundreds of material combos.

Re:Frames

[fleeped]

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.

Re:forget the gameplay!

[RogueyWon]

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.

Re:forget the gameplay!

[dunkelfalke]

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.

What?

[Lunix Nutcase]

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.

Re:What?

[westlake]

Rendering a game is kiddy stuff...

--- until you are expected to believer a theatrical quality experience while running a game on hardware costing no more than $500 retail list.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a joke right? Simulating fluid dynamics, simulating weather patterns, finding large primes, factoring primes, etc. are all far more computationally intensive.

Errr... factoring primes is one of the least computationally intensive problems possible. The factors are always 1 and the number itself. I think you meant finding prime factors.

In any case you are being a bit pedantic. It is clear that the author was referring to computationally intensive retail software running on commonly available retail hardware. There is no mass-market for weather forecasting software or fluid dynamics simulators.

Re:What?

[drinkypoo]

Video games are among the most computationally intensive applications

This is a joke right?

Barring being taken over and being used as part of a botnet for grinding out cryptocoins, the most computationally intensive program most people's computer will ever run will be a video game.

Re:Frames

[Kjella]

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.

Instructive to see how far we have come

[EmBeeDee]

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.