The future of graphics technology?

[SecretMaster]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

So my level of knowledge on this sort of subject matter isn't all that good, especially compared to some of the people we have here at TR. I was wondering what fellow gerbils thought about this presentation. Does the company have something substantial, or is it another technology like ray-tracing that is years into the future?

To me it looks like one of those things that are too good to be true, but I don't know nearly enough to have a valid opinion.

[Meadows]

They really did progress since their last video, the huge island and the scanned rocks are new. Looks much better, too.
Could use more colour saturation though.

[computron9000]

When they show some animations i'll be impressed. Animating particle clouds is a different story than showing static particle clouds with a moving camera.

It's impressive, granted, but you'll notice those grass blades, leaves, dirt particles, etc.... are not moving. Wind movement, water movement, physics, etc. "Ground in polygon game" the grass moves, at least.

I think crappy looking grass that can blow in the wind looks more "real" than permanently erect grass that is more refined.

[C-A_99]

Animation definitely looks to be the trickiest part to pull off, or so it would seem from how their algorithm works. It would also require very good memory management. Procedural generation should help a ton in that regard, so long as only the most minor details are generated procedurally; can't have larger details being inconsistent throughout games especially when going over a network.

[just brew it!]

I have to wonder whether this will be one of those technologies like ray tracing, which are great in theory but ultimately impractical for implementing a playable game on reasonable hardware.

[skialex25]

Might this be an opportunity for developers to start using those multiple cores all of us have stashed away in our rigs?

[Aphasia]

Some games are pretty good at using them, Dice-games for one. And Civ for another. But yeah, theres often lots of extra power tucked away under the hood in the CPU's.

[Waco]

I can't imagine you'd ever be able to animate this without monstrous gobs of memory. All this allows you to do is efficiently display numerous identical models. As soon as you crank up the variation, or hell, animate it, (you know, to have unlimited detail) your memory requirements will shoot through the roof.

This seems like another cash-grab to me.

[just brew it!]

I can't imagine you'd ever be able to animate this without monstrous gobs of memory. All this allows you to do is efficiently display numerous identical models. As soon as you crank up the variation, or hell, animate it, (you know, to have unlimited detail) your memory requirements will shoot through the roof.

This seems like another cash-grab to me.

You could get around the memory issue by generating the models procedurally. But then you've essentially traded memory usage for CPU cycles, which may result in a CPU bottleneck instead.

[Waco]

You could get around the memory issue by generating the models procedurally. But then you've essentially traded memory usage for CPU cycles, which may result in a CPU bottleneck instead.

Exactly. In something that's software rendered I doubt any modern CPU can keep a reasonable framerate when procedurally generating an entire scene in motion.

[Deathright]

I can't imagine you'd ever be able to animate this without monstrous gobs of memory. All this allows you to do is efficiently display numerous identical models. As soon as you crank up the variation, or hell, animate it, (you know, to have unlimited detail) your memory requirements will shoot through the roof.

This seems like another cash-grab to me.

You could get around the memory issue by generating the models procedurally. But then you've essentially traded memory usage for CPU cycles, which may result in a CPU bottleneck instead.

Don't we kind of have CPU power to spare these days though?

[just brew it!]

You could get around the memory issue by generating the models procedurally. But then you've essentially traded memory usage for CPU cycles, which may result in a CPU bottleneck instead.

Don't we kind of have CPU power to spare these days though?

Probably still not enough to do this sort of thing effectively in real-time, unless you want to set up a mini render farm and a 10 gigabit network to move all the data around.