How close to cinematic quality animation ... ?

[handbrake2]

How close do you think PS3/XB360/Revo will actually get and under what circumstances?

After reading lots of threads the consensus was that the Killzone pics and video HAD to be pre-rendered, even before it was confirmed. The reason being that it looked too close to FF:TSW to be realtime. Given the render quality and sheer volume of stuff going on I could see how you could come to that conclusion.
HOWEVER
What if there were fewer characters in an enclused and controlled environment. I think of the sword fight scene from Final Flight of the Osiris. It's a closed, and relatively plainly decorated room, and there are only 2 combatants. On the other hand, the poly counts appear to be off the scale, and the fabric simulation and lighting are fantastic. Does anyone think that the new consoles could render realtime cutscenes or even a fighting game (with ovviously reduced AA) at that quality? NBA2K6 already seems to have the cloth simulation down cold.

Handbrake2.

 

[jvd]

You see the unreal engine 3 demos ? That is about how close we are going to get . Mabye by the end of the generation 3x as detailed as that .

Still far from cgi quality

 

[mckmas8808]

Yep. Everything that we have seen on today's consoles in CG can be done on next gen in real-time. Imagne God of War 2 looking like God of War's CG, but in real time.

OMG!!!
________
Ford pronto picture

 

[DuckThor Evil]

No we won't and I wouldn't bet on that even PS4 generation would be able to render FF TSW in realtime, actually I'm quite sure about that.

 

[handbrake2]

Does anybody care to take a stab at the polygon budget for a scene in Gears of War? (UE3 like you suggested JVD).

I went back to an old Ars Technica interview with Square Pictures on FF:TSW and they said that on average main characters have poly counts made up of 300k (clothes), 30k (facial geometry), 20k (eyeborws/eyelashes) and 60K (hair - but this is a guesstimate). This gives 410k polys per character. Assume 2 characters in a fighter and 180k for visible background = 1 million polys per scene.

Given that R500 is "supposed" to do 500 million polys per sec with "non-trivial shaders", shouldn't consoles have plenty of juice left for lighting and shadows? Heck, NV did a demo of a FF:TSW "scene" at a few frames per sec years ago, albeit with lower IQ. Shouldn't we be able to see games played at that same level now?

Again, I am not talking about scenes with massive vistas or large numbers of characters on screen at once.

 

[jvd]

Remember this generation will be largely about normal maps and a huge increase in texture quality and effects .

In the unreal 3 engine video from last years e3 they were talking about taking a 100 million polygon model and making it into a 1 million polygon model but keeping the look with the normal maps .

x360 has 3dc which should help with compersion and if the ps3 doesn't have it they can allways do the dxtc with the extra swizzle trick to compress them .

These aren't even finished launch titles. You will see some great stuff going on . In the end the ps3 and x360 will be close in what they display and we can talk about what really matters which are the gamss

 

[talyn99]

Man, all consoles will kick ass, but come on, most of you are in denial. PS3 will kick ass, and they have time to add and tweak more stuff in time. I do not hate X-block, just wont put money into Bill's pocket, that all.

But Im saving NOW, my PS3 and N-REv money is in my pig

 

[jvd]

Man, all consoles will kick ass, but come on, most of you are in denial. PS3 will kick ass, and they have time to add and tweak more stuff in time. I do not hate X-block, just wont put money into Bill's pocket, that all.

But Im saving NOW, my PS3 and N-REv money is in my pig

well so far you haven't given any reasons why it will kick ass .

There are so many unkowns with both systems but they are launching about 6 months apart . I don't expect more than a 50% increase in performance (And thats pushing it ) between the two . With the main diffrence being the cpu in favor of sony. Don't forget sony has more ports and bluray in which it needs to recoup its costs . It also apears that the cell is twice the size of the xcpu and that the gpu is also bigger than the xcpu factor in that the xdr ram is also more expensive than the gddr ram used in both and you have a much more expensive system off the bat.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Problematic stuff for current consoles:
- believably smooth character animation without the jerky transitions and sliding
- fully dynamic ambient occlusion (KZ movie has it for example)
- subpixel displacement mapping (normal mapping will be used instead)
- high quality shader, texture and geometry AA, temporal AA
- shadowing will also be a problem, probably only 1 cast shadow per object with shadow maps having bugs/pixelations in some cases
- full simulated clothing, realistic hair


FF:TSW might have had that complexity, but at render time, both their models and most of today's CGI characters are tesselated into subdivision surfaces and then they're displacement mapped, both with Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman. This means that you'd get back the full 100 million polygon detail from that GOW scene, both on shiluettes, shadows, speculars and all.
PRMan can also add motion blur to such insanely complex scenes easily.

Oh, and hair is rendered in PRMan using small tube primitives generated on the fly. Aki had about 150.000 individual hair strands in close-up shots, which needed a massive amount of geometry to render properly (and took a lot of time, too). Current gen hardware won't go beyond cleverly textured polygons for hair and fur, they just can't handle the geometry for individual fur/hair strands...

 

[ninelven]

erased

 

[jvd]

Don't forget sony has more ports and bluray in which it needs to recoup its costs .

I have been wondering about this myself. From the presentation and released specs, it seems as though PS3 may not actually come with a hard drive (my own conjecture). This would be dissapointing but cost saving :? .

no it doesn't apear that it will . They are most likely banking on the memory sticks to get most people to do micro transactions .


Personal bluray may be the biggest draw to the ps3 or what destroys the ps3 . And it all rests on the media war . If hd-dvd crushes bluray it may just be an expense to the cost of the system .

 

[Acert93]

Yep....

OMG!!!

Have a look at Laa-Yosh's post:

Problematic stuff for current consoles:
- believably smooth character animation without the jerky transitions and sliding
- fully dynamic ambient occlusion (KZ movie has it for example)
- subpixel displacement mapping (normal mapping will be used instead)
- high quality shader, texture and geometry AA, temporal AA
- shadowing will also be a problem, probably only 1 cast shadow per object with shadow maps having bugs/pixelations in some cases
- full simulated clothing, realistic hair

Don't let any of the CGI from MS or Sony get your panties in a bunch. Laa-Yosh has pointed out a lot of areas that this gen will have problems.

Remember, the R500 and the RSX are only about 2-2x as powerful as a GF 6800U. Do not expect big miracles... we will see some great stuff on these closed boxes, but expecting some Uber CGI that takes hours on offline Renderers is a joke.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

It's one part graphics and one part CPU power. Cloth and hair simulation take a lot of time, but they can be distributed to the same racked computers that studios use for the rendering.
And most of the time, CGI is only 98-99% perfect and the rest get fixed with dirty tricks, like meshing together several different cloth simulation's results, or painting out penetrating objects frame by frame in 2D post processing, or faking shadows and so on.
This is a luxury that realtime apps won't have, so there will be many little bugs with the simulated cloth and hair and dynamics.

Nonetheless, we can expect nextgen AAA titles to surpass all but the top quality prerendered stuff in overall impressions.