Could PlayStation 4 breathe new life into Software Based Rendering?

[onQ]

He was wrong about several things one example is The Witcher 3 resolution.

Witcher 3 isn't even out yet & things could have changed since he 1st got the info.

 

[onQ]

 

[Karamazov]

This game really reminded me of old pixar movies, the toy story like graphics promise of the.ps2 finally achieved ? ^^

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I got that vibe far more from Wild. This is more like miniature photorealism. Incredibly convincing at times, like top draw CGI.

 

[Karamazov]

Wild looks great but animation needs a lot of work imo.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I got that vibe far more from Wild. This is more like miniature photorealism. Incredibly convincing at times, like top draw CGI.

This. And again I have to keep reminding myself, we're not even one year out of release of these consoles.

I keep reading folks moaning that the new consoles aren't much of an improvement [graphically] over the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Hopefully this Gamescom will put such criticisms to bed. Rime, Children of Tomorrow and Wild all have really cool art styles and visuals that look way beyond the last gen. The P.T. demo was awesome (for those of us man enough to finish it!) and Quantum Break, Bloodborne and The Order showed how gorgeous the AAAs are going to look.

Very exciting all round.

 

[onQ]

This game really reminded me of old pixar movies, the toy story like graphics promise of the.ps2 finally achieved ? ^^

I got that vibe far more from Wild. This is more like miniature photorealism. Incredibly convincing at times, like top draw CGI.

Well the best way to get the look of Computer-generated imagery is to generate images with computing.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This. And again I have to keep reminding myself, we're not even one year out of release of these consoles.

I keep reading folks moaning that the new consoles aren't much of an improvement [graphically] over the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Hopefully this Gamescom will put such criticisms to bed. Rime, Children of Tomorrow and Wild all have really cool art styles and visuals that look way beyond the last gen.

It's had that effect on me. Trouble was first year games were all much of the same (understandable). And let's be honest, last gen covered some amazing ground for aesthetics. These new art-styles are showing that things are going to be interesting once again. I dare say the biggest differentiator is lighting. It's becoming very realistic and moving games from looking like games to looking like CGI (non-realtime rendered computer imagery for those who want to be pedantic ).

 

[onQ]

It's had that effect on me. Trouble was first year games were all much of the same (understandable). And let's be honest, last gen covered some amazing ground for aesthetics. These new art-styles are showing that things are going to be interesting once again. I dare say the biggest differentiator is lighting. It's becoming very realistic and moving games from looking like games to looking like CGI (non-realtime rendered computer imagery for those who want to be pedantic ).

I think this generation is going to be all about physically based rendering.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I dare say the biggest differentiator is lighting. It's becoming very realistic and moving games from looking like games to looking like CGI (non-realtime rendered computer imagery for those who want to be pedantic ).

I've been telling that to you guys for a few years

 

[upnorthsox]

With Jaymin being such a Cell warrior, when I read asynch compute I thought they had done this on the PS3. I see now he's talking gpu compute.

I wonder if this is a variation of Cyril Crassin's gigavoxels/voxel cone tracing.

Impressive.

 

[upnorthsox]

I've been telling that to you guys for a few years

Yes you have...

 

[onQ]

PS4 Exclusive The Tomorrow Children Uses New Ray Tracing Tech with Real Reflections; More Info Shared

Today at Gamescom I sat in a presentation in which Q-Games President Dylan Cuthbert shared more details about the lovely PS4 exclusive The Tomorrow Children, which was introduced yesterday with an impressive trailer.

Here’s a summary of the information he provided about the game:
The Tomorrow Children uses a new lighting technology named Cascaded Voxel Cone Ray Tracing, which allows to simulate lighting in real time, and uses actual real reflections, and not screen space reflections like most games.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I've been telling that to you guys for a few years

Indeed you have, but I've been of that opinion myself for many a year, before joining B3D. Realistic lighting makes things look real and solid, even if unnatural. Stick a PS1 low poly, low texture model in a photorealistic renderer, it'll look like a solid piece of cardboard or something. With the right shaders, it'll look like an organic polygon thing. Stick a billion poly, perfectly sculptured, wonderfully textured object in a PS3 level renderer and it'll look like a computer game.

 

[upnorthsox]

Some more info:

Our work takes the highly promising technique of Voxel Cone Tracing, and shows how it can practically be applied in a Game Engine that targets the PS4 to provide dynamic 2-3 bounce indirect illumination in a game running at 30hz. Our approach requires no pre-processing of scene geometry, and enables us to handle semi-dynamic worlds in which buildings and landscape are frequently altered. We also handle soft shadowing of the indirect illumination for fully dynamic objects such as vehicles and characters.

The main insight of our work is that a change in data structure from Sparse Voxel Octrees to one based on a cascaded 3D textures allows far more opportunities for optimization at the cost of a reduction in detail. As this reduction in detail is related to an objects distance from the camera however it doesn’t result in a significant loss of perceived quality of the indirect illumination.

Due to the artistic requirements of our game, we actually use Cone Tracing for both direct and indirect illumination, resulting in a world without sharp shadows; however, we believe that our technique should be very easy to extend to work with reflective shadow maps, and thus provide indirect illumination for games with a more traditional appearance.

The flexibility of our approach also allows us to easily handle traditionally tricky features such as sub-surface scattering, particle systems with a volumetric appearance and glossy refraction. In addition, we are also able to integrate with a screen space technique derived from SSDO that provides per pixel occlusion of our direct and indirect lighting.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's exactly what Sony's research a while back was talking about. Think it was Sony, at Siggraph or something. Using 3D textures as light structures. If someone wants to dig up the paper, we'll have a good description of The Tomorrow Children's tech.

 

[Inuhanyou]

To be clear, this is a version of voxel lighting that is similar to the UE4 version they shelved because it was too computationally expensive?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes, I believe so, although SVOGI didn't have access to 3D textures and compute when it was in development. Or if it did, Epic didn't think to use it.

 

[jlippo]

To be clear, this is a version of voxel lighting that is similar to the UE4 version they shelved because it was too computationally expensive?

Similar, yes.

As it uses cascaded method it might be closer to the nvidias gi works.
http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gt...2-rt-voxel-based-global-illumination-gpus.pdf

 

[onQ]

That's exactly what Sony's research a while back was talking about. Think it was Sony, at Siggraph or something. Using 3D textures as light structures. If someone wants to dig up the paper, we'll have a good description of The Tomorrow Children's tech.

This?
http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdceurope2013/Presentations/825424RichardStenson.pdf