Normal Mapping, HDR, Soft Shadows...

[Zenoth]

Liquids Physics and effects.

Realistic splashes (not just a bunch of 2-D animated sprites scripted to appear on the surface of another 2-D layer), liquids (mostly water) realistically, dynamically flowing down on any types of surfaces and textures when raining, affected by gravity (rain water falling down from a house for example), dynamic water peregrination on soils, following terrain paths to end up at one or more specific points (flowing on a street to end up in a canal). Etc, etc, etc.

 

[40sTheme]

Originally posted by: tanishalfelven

Originally posted by: 40sTheme

Originally posted by: enz660hp
I was looking at some screens where the depth of field effects like in call of juarez seem a little annoying. Maybe its a different experience when actually playing the game on a massive monitor?

Yes, they are all pretty annoying.
Also, I wish we could do away altogether with LOD... not keep it... it would be nicer to see everything in full detail all the time.

isn't LOD just a trick to ease the load on the graphics card ?

Yes, and most games perform it very, very poorly (the LOD looks like dump poop)

 

[enz660hp]

Originally posted by: Zenoth
Liquids Physics and effects.

Realistic splashes (not just a bunch of 2-D animated sprites scripted to appear on the surface of another 2-D layer), liquids (mostly water) realistically, dynamically flowing down on any types of surfaces and textures when raining, affected by gravity (rain water falling down from a house for example), dynamic water peregrination on soils, following terrain paths to end up at one or more specific points (flowing on a street to end up in a canal). Etc, etc, etc.

wow sounds like I would need another core 2 duo just for the physics of all that! haha

 

[Schadenfroh]

Where are all the Tile-Based rendering fanboys?

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: A554SS1N

Originally posted by: aka1nas

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

some quad core, dual 8800 system could probably render the toy story movie in real time right?

Not a chance in hell. They have entire server farms working on rendering that in real time. Not only that, the 8800 is consumer level not workstation. Even a Quadro or FireGL, or a 3DLabs card in that system couldn't do it.

-Kevin

Actually I am pretty sure we passed the point of rendering Toy Story in real time a few generations ago. Remember, that movie came out 12 years ago! While it did take entire server farms to produce that movie, such render farms are using many CPU in parallel to process the frame data, rather than dedicated graphics hardware. Add that to the fact that it was 12-year old high-end CPU tech.

Agreed!

Yes 12 years ago we were significantly slower....but they had ENORMOUS server farms running massively parallel computers. Sorry there is no way a Quad Core with any Video Card is going to be able to render Toy Story in real time.

-Kevin

 

[Gamingphreek]

A big wall with rack after rack of Sun Sparkstations to was used to render the frames. The typical rendering time is 4 hours a frame, but this could stretch to 13 hours for some pathological cases.

Point in case. Keep in mind that was ONE frame on racks of Sun Ultra Spac Computers.

-Kevin

 

[xtknight]

Well, a high-end GPU can process frames at least 100 times faster than a high-end CPU.

 

[GundamSonicZeroX]

What's normal mapping? I've heard of bump and parralax mapping. But not normal.

 

[40sTheme]

Originally posted by: GundamSonicZeroX
What's normal mapping? I've heard of bump and parralax mapping. But not normal.

Check it yo

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Well, a high-end GPU can process frames at least 100 times faster than a high-end CPU.

But then again, it took 800,000 hours to render the whole 77 minute movie. We are talking from 2 to 15 hours to render each frame...and that was 300 Sun Workstations in a render farm!! We'd need to render 24 of frames every second to have a watchable movie in real time.

Even if you could do it 10,000 times faster (is a modern CPU / GPU 10,000 times faster than a render farm of 300 circa 1995 workstations?...maybe 10,000 times faster than ENIAC though ), that's still 80 hours for a 77 minute movie. (If you keep the original's resolution, which was about 300MB worth of textures per frame, if memory serves me right).

 

[BFG10K]

Is there anyway we can ditch polygons altogether?

What would you replace them with?

What's normal mapping?

Normal mapping replaces the normal of a texture, unlike bump mapping which just modifies the existing normal

 

[josh6079]

64-bit color? Wouldn't that make more realistic textures?

 

[Munky]

With pixel shaders you can already do almost anything you can think of. The hard part is getting the desired effect to look good while maintaining sufficient performance. And, after playing Oblivion with the high res texture mods, I can say that the visual aspect of modern games has reached a level where I have nothing to complain about. What I really want from games is more open-ended gameplay, a captivating storyline, and more realistic physics.

 

[CP5670]

I would like to see a return of detail texturing. This effect was used in the Unreal 1-based games and had a huge impact on IQ, allowing for immense close-up detail on textures with minimal video memory usage, but it has rarely been used since then. In general, the textures in many modern games are dodgy, often looking blurrier and less detailed than those in some games from several years ago.

HDR (i.e. true HDR with HDR capable monitors instead of tone mapping) is also something that would be good to have, although I don't think we'll see the monitors in the consumer market any time soon.

 

[enz660hp]

Originally posted by: CP5670
I would like to see a return of detail texturing. This effect was used in the Unreal 1-based games and had a huge impact on IQ, allowing for immense close-up detail on textures with minimal video memory usage, but it has rarely been used since then. In general, the textures in many modern games are dodgy, often looking blurrier and less detailed than those in some games from several years ago.

HDR (i.e. true HDR with HDR capable monitors instead of tone mapping) is also something that would be good to have, although I don't think we'll see the monitors in the consumer market any time soon.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/10/04/brightside_hdr_edr/1.html

 

[SonicIce]

I think with a modern high-end gaming pc, you could render Toy Story in real time at lower quality. Many optimizations and tricks would need to be used. Subtle effects could be eliminated or dumbed-down (like using a static reflection on Buzz's helmet instead of a real-time one). Compressed and lower resolution textures and models could be used. After cutting everything down I don't think it would look much worse unless you compared them side by side and/or watching it in high-definition. There?s no way you could render the video at the exact same quality though.

The problem with Level of Detail is that the computer doesn't know what your eye is focusing on. This is also why motion blur sucks. Someone needs to come up with a way to set up a camera or something to track your pupil. The camera would communicate with the software and whatever you're not focusing that is moving will get blurred and everything behind or in front of your focal point would get blurred. That'd be awesome.

Nothing will be even close to real life unless it is rendered in stereo (a view for each eye, 3D goggles etc). Otherwise there is no depth perception.

Another key element to realism is realistically moving objects. I think current physics processors (or CPU's) are powerful enough but they're not being utilized to their full extent. Imagine a soldier running. His clothes and his weapon and everything strapped to him is independent from his body and flops around as he runs. In today?s games it looks like everything is taped or glued to his body and doesn't move realistically.

64-bit color? There are plenty of colors. Maybe just throw in some subtle earth tones.

Realistic faces are very hard to create. I?ll add to this later but I forgot what I was gunna say and i'm tired.

 

[CP5670]

Originally posted by: enz660hp

Originally posted by: CP5670
I would like to see a return of detail texturing. This effect was used in the Unreal 1-based games and had a huge impact on IQ, allowing for immense close-up detail on textures with minimal video memory usage, but it has rarely been used since then. In general, the textures in many modern games are dodgy, often looking blurrier and less detailed than those in some games from several years ago.

HDR (i.e. true HDR with HDR capable monitors instead of tone mapping) is also something that would be good to have, although I don't think we'll see the monitors in the consumer market any time soon.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/10/04/brightside_hdr_edr/1.html

At $50000, I don't think that one can really be considered to be marketed towards consumers. Things like that exist in the pro market, but we'll need to see them at reasonable prices before games and video cards start using them.

 

[evolucion8]

It has been implemented in demos (ATi's SubSurface Scattering demo on the X800 series) But I haven't seen in any games at all. I hope it gets widely used on DX10 then. The only 3D app that I saw Softshadow implemented well was on the Ruby's Double Cross demo, but in games the implementation (F.E.A.R. and Oblivion) is mediocre. And the Workstation Cards are slower than consumer cards when we play games on them, but in graphic creation which requires a lot of writting and processing, a Workstation card will smoke any consumer card, particularly cause the driver is more optimized to it. After all the consumer GPU's don't tend to read what they write. Also I heard that LOD is replacing texture resolutions depending of the viewing distance, if for example, a certain texture is only using 512x512 of the screen, using a texture of higher resolution would cause artifacting (Thanks that AF is here to solve it) and performance decrease, after all there's no benefit of using a higher resolution texture on such small space. About Normal Mapping it can be implemented better if we use better compression tools like 3dc, the DXTC will cause artifacting, I guess that we really need also is Shader Anti Aliasing, have you seen in games like Serious Sam 2 and Half Life 2 that in certain angles the pixel shaders in the water creates a lot of aliasing like artifacting? It looks horrible at certain angles. And I think that 64-Bit color is on each component could be nice, DX9 already states 128-Bit color (32 on each component) allowing to use up to 2 Billion of colors, but don't think that any LCD or CRT is able to display that much. And not sure also if that 128-Bit color is only in the pixel shaders or also in the textures, cause I can see that in the DX Texture Compression formats, the max selectable in some games and benchmarks is 32 Bits, interesting...

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: tanishalfelven

Originally posted by: 40sTheme

Originally posted by: enz660hp
I was looking at some screens where the depth of field effects like in call of juarez seem a little annoying. Maybe its a different experience when actually playing the game on a massive monitor?

Yes, they are all pretty annoying.
Also, I wish we could do away altogether with LOD... not keep it... it would be nicer to see everything in full detail all the time.

isn't LOD just a trick to ease the load on the graphics card ?

Yes. Say hello to 10FPS if you want to get rid of LOD.

Yes, and most games perform it very, very poorly (the LOD looks like dump poop)

That's because of ram limits. If every surface on screen had a high enough resolution image associated with it so that the surface would look good with your face pressed against it, video cards would need 100GB of memory.

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: Noema

Originally posted by: xtknight
Well, a high-end GPU can process frames at least 100 times faster than a high-end CPU.

But then again, it took 800,000 hours to render the whole 77 minute movie. We are talking from 2 to 15 hours to render each frame...and that was 300 Sun Workstations in a render farm!! We'd need to render 24 of frames every second to have a watchable movie in real time.

Even if you could do it 10,000 times faster (is a modern CPU / GPU 10,000 times faster than a render farm of 300 circa 1995 workstations?...maybe 10,000 times faster than ENIAC though ), that's still 80 hours for a 77 minute movie. (If you keep the original's resolution, which was about 300MB worth of textures per frame, if memory serves me right).

This isn't a valid comparison but a G80 has a theoretical performance of 345 GFlops and 300 Ultra Sparc 1's would have theoretical performance of 25 GFlops. This comparison doesn't really make any sense since you would use the texture pipelines for texturing and not the shaders but heck, nonsense never stopped anyone from posting on AT before.

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime

Originally posted by: Noema

Originally posted by: xtknight
Well, a high-end GPU can process frames at least 100 times faster than a high-end CPU.

But then again, it took 800,000 hours to render the whole 77 minute movie. We are talking from 2 to 15 hours to render each frame...and that was 300 Sun Workstations in a render farm!! We'd need to render 24 of frames every second to have a watchable movie in real time.

Even if you could do it 10,000 times faster (is a modern CPU / GPU 10,000 times faster than a render farm of 300 circa 1995 workstations?...maybe 10,000 times faster than ENIAC though ), that's still 80 hours for a 77 minute movie. (If you keep the original's resolution, which was about 300MB worth of textures per frame, if memory serves me right).

This isn't a valid comparison but a G80 has a theoretical performance of 345 GFlops and 300 Ultra Sparc 1's would have theoretical performance of 25 GFlops. This comparison doesn't really make any sense since you would use the texture pipelines for texturing and not the shaders but heck, nonsense never stopped anyone from posting on AT before.

Also the general purpose code used in cpu is more flexible and doesn't like to work in parallel. The code used on GPU's is far more parallel but it just work as is intented to, and lack from the flexibility needed for many tasks, even though the today's GPU's are far more powerful than any CPU in the market, trying to use it as a general purpose CPU is simply a task nearly impossible to do. Even though the 8800GTX has a certain approach of it, still far behind in terms of flexibility against any modern CPU.

 

[SonicIce]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime

Originally posted by: tanishalfelven

Originally posted by: 40sTheme

Originally posted by: enz660hp
I was looking at some screens where the depth of field effects like in call of juarez seem a little annoying. Maybe its a different experience when actually playing the game on a massive monitor?

Yes, they are all pretty annoying.
Also, I wish we could do away altogether with LOD... not keep it... it would be nicer to see everything in full detail all the time.

isn't LOD just a trick to ease the load on the graphics card ?

Yes. Say hello to 10FPS if you want to get rid of LOD.

Yes, and most games perform it very, very poorly (the LOD looks like dump poop)

That's because of ram limits. If every surface on screen had a high enough resolution image associated with it so that the surface would look good with your face pressed against it, video cards would need 100GB of memory.

Uh when I said level of detail what i meant to say was depth of field. i always confuse the two. my bad

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: SonicIce

Originally posted by: zephyrprime

Originally posted by: tanishalfelven

Originally posted by: 40sTheme

Originally posted by: enz660hp
I was looking at some screens where the depth of field effects like in call of juarez seem a little annoying. Maybe its a different experience when actually playing the game on a massive monitor?

Yes, they are all pretty annoying.
Also, I wish we could do away altogether with LOD... not keep it... it would be nicer to see everything in full detail all the time.

isn't LOD just a trick to ease the load on the graphics card ?

Yes. Say hello to 10FPS if you want to get rid of LOD.

Yes, and most games perform it very, very poorly (the LOD looks like dump poop)

That's because of ram limits. If every surface on screen had a high enough resolution image associated with it so that the surface would look good with your face pressed against it, video cards would need 100GB of memory.

Uh when I said level of detail what i meant to say was depth of field. i always confuse the two. my bad

The only game that I've seen using the Depth of Field is Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness, pretty sure there's some other games with it, and many 3d Demos also used it, better implemented than in games of course, the Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness implementation tends to look blocky from a distance, probably because the computer doesn't know the camera view.

 

[SonicIce]

Crysis will have depth of field and motion blur

 

[40sTheme]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime

Originally posted by: tanishalfelven

Originally posted by: 40sTheme

Originally posted by: enz660hp
I was looking at some screens where the depth of field effects like in call of juarez seem a little annoying. Maybe its a different experience when actually playing the game on a massive monitor?

Yes, they are all pretty annoying.
Also, I wish we could do away altogether with LOD... not keep it... it would be nicer to see everything in full detail all the time.

isn't LOD just a trick to ease the load on the graphics card ?

Yes. Say hello to 10FPS if you want to get rid of LOD.

Yes, and most games perform it very, very poorly (the LOD looks like dump poop)

That's because of ram limits. If every surface on screen had a high enough resolution image associated with it so that the surface would look good with your face pressed against it, video cards would need 100GB of memory.

Well, yes, but I guess I didn't specify that I wanted to see it in DX10. If DX10 is as optimized as it supposedly is, then it would be nice to see LOD disappear.