Nintendo Revolution: Displacement Mapping Be The Last Key Factor?

Nintendo Revolution: Displacement Mapping be the last key factor against PS3 & Xbox 360?

Is displacement mapping the last secret?

Browsing for more clues concerning the Revolution´s last secret, I came across the issue of displacement mapping, an improved version of bump mapping, if you will. This cropped up briefly in relation to the Nintendo Revolution some months ago, but I believe it has not been given enough attention. But before we go into that, let´s understand what this technique is about.

Why could displacement mapping be Nintendo related?

Firstly, there is a Nintendo patent that has caused this topic to crop up in this community before. It is entitled Method and apparatus for efficient generation of texture coordinate displacements for implementing emboss-style bump mapping in a graphics rendering system. Its abstract is a bit of a mouthful, unfortunately. Read my highlights, though:

A graphics system including a custom graphics and audio processor produces exciting 2D and 3D graphics and surround sound. The system includes a graphics and audio processor including a 3D graphics pipeline and an audio digital signal processor. Emboss style effects are created using fully pipelined hardware including two distinct dot-product computation units that perform a scaled model view matrix multiply without requiring the Normal input vector and which also compute dot-products between the Binormal and Tangent vectors and a light direction vector in parallel. The resulting texture coordinate displacements are provided to texture mapping hardware that performs a texture mapping operation providing texture combining in one pass. The disclosed pipelined arrangement efficiently provides interesting embossed style image effects such as raised and lowered patterns on surfaces.

This proves that Nintendo has not only been interested in this technique but is a patent holder. The section entitled ´cross-reference to related applications´ references 25 separate provisional patent applications that are thereby incorporated into the patent. Almost all of them date back to 2000. This would suggest that it is an important patent that has kept Nintendo busy but doesn´t date back too far to be cutting edge.

Secondly, relating back to making the process of displacement mapping more efficient and less of a strain on the CPU, one way of adaptive tessellation might actually be the last Nintendo patent I talked about in great detail, called Three-dimensional image generating apparatus, storage medium storing a three-dimensional image generating program, and three-dimensional image generating method. A number of readers pointed out that the patent had nothing to do with actually visualising graphics in 3D, but rather optimizing a 3D world to be viewed on a 2D display. Then, that patent made little sense to me. But in the context of trying to reduce the computational strain on the CPU involved in displacement mapping, this may make perfect sense.

Lastly, whether the Revolution´s graphics chip will turn out to be based on the R520 or R530, it will be Radeon technology. And its manufacturer ATI has the following advice for developers on their Designing for Radeon development support page: Use multi-texturing effects for realistic low polygon primitives. For example, you can use emboss style bump mapping to achieve the illusion of a bumpy surface that would take a lot more polygons to approximate otherwise. Similarly, other intelligent use of texture maps can reduce the polygon count of your mesh designs.

This may not be unusual, since nVidia will undoubtedly have similar advice on their development support pages, but at least it shows that ATI is also very concerned with this technique. In fact, ATI supported this technology earlier than nVidia, it seems. While the Radeon 9500/9700 was capable of displacement mapping, the GeForce FX was only partly so. The Radeon 9700 Pro already supported adaptive tessellation. In fact, ATI has an exclusive technology called ´Truform 2.0´, which is a kind of tessellation.
 
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nAo said:
LOL :LOL: That patent is about Flipper, not Revolution GPU ;)

ROFL :LOL:

Edit: Wait a minute!?! Wouldn’t this still be considered a key feature to carry over (and improved upon) for the new Revolution GPU?
 
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Nerve-Damage said:
ROFL :LOL:

Edit: Wait a minute!?! Wouldn’t this still be considered a key feature to carry over (and improved upon) for the new Revolution GPU?

And hasn't every ATI gpu since the 9700 pro supported it?
 
Gamecube used displacement mapping in the opening Death Star level in Rogue Leader and the landscapes. You know, unless Eggebrecht was outright lying, which I somehow doubt. There was an article about it on Gamasutra way back when. But doesn't the technique actually increase your final vertex count?

http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2002/features/chen/chen_03.htm

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20021002/sauer_01.htm

Flipper actually can do a lot of crap at the pixel-level. I'm kinda surprised...of course, it can't do all of that stuff all at once. Fillrate and data throughput limitations. Gee, I wonder how much more you could do if you double-clocked the thing. ;-)

Question: How come Factor 5 was the only company to implement self-shadowing in a Gamecube game? Is a Star Wars-based space flight game the ONLY type of game that can implement it without an enormous performance hit? Or do the guys at F5 happen to be 100x smarter than all the other Cube developers?
 
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fearsomepirate said:
Gamecube used displacement mapping in the opening Death Star level in Rogue Leader and the landscapes. You know, unless Eggebrecht was outright lying, which I somehow doubt. There was an article about it on Gamasutra way back when. But doesn't the technique actually increase your final vertex count?

http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2002/features/chen/chen_03.htm

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20021002/sauer_01.htm

Flipper actually can do a lot of crap at the pixel-level. I'm kinda surprised...of course, it can't do all of that stuff all at once. Fillrate and data throughput limitations. Gee, I wonder how much more you could do if you double-clocked the thing. ;-)

Question: How come Factor 5 was the only company to implement self-shadowing in a Gamecube game? Is a Star Wars-based space flight game the ONLY type of game that can implement it without an enormous performance hit? Or do the guys at F5 happen to be 100x smarter than all the other Cube developers?

Don't Resident Evil 4 and Super Smash Bros Melee both make use of self shadowing?

And IIRC, a lot of gamecube effects come for free once other effects are enabled.

BTW, how come when posting a message there are icon choices for ATI, nvidia, S3, XGI, DirectX, OpenGL, AMD, Intel, Playstation, and Xbox but no 3dfx, Nintendo, or VIA.
 
Fox5 said:
Don't Resident Evil 4 and Super Smash Bros Melee both make use of self shadowing?

And IIRC, a lot of gamecube effects come for free once other effects are enabled.

BTW, how come when posting a message there are icon choices for ATI, nvidia, S3, XGI, DirectX, OpenGL, AMD, Intel, Playstation, and Xbox but no 3dfx, Nintendo, or VIA.

Nintendo is teh kiddie!!!11!! RE4 has no self-shadowing. It doesn't even have volumetric player/enemy shadows, although it does have some in cutscenes. Neither do SSBM, Windwaker, Prime, Twin Snakes, and DOR2. Gamespots review of Eternal Darkness claims it does, but I don't see it.
 
fearsomepirate said:
Nintendo is teh kiddie!!!11!! RE4 has no self-shadowing. It doesn't even have volumetric player/enemy shadows, although it does have some in cutscenes. Neither do SSBM, Windwaker, Prime, Twin Snakes, and DOR2. Gamespots review of Eternal Darkness claims it does, but I don't see it.

volumetric shadows? in case you meant shadow volumes - nope, re4 uses projected shadow maps for the cutscenes and fake drop shadows during play time. the game still has visually amazing cinematics, though, unlike some high bidders *cough.. halo2.. cough*
 
darkblu said:
volumetric shadows? in case you meant shadow volumes - nope, re4 uses projected shadow maps for the cutscenes and fake drop shadows during play time. the game still has visually amazing cinematics, though, unlike some high bidders *cough.. halo2.. cough*

Er, yeah, that's what I meant. Wasn't 100% aware of the difference, but I know now. I meant to say volumetric shadows (like AutoCad does--I thin Windwaker does these, since they don't pixellate), but what I really meant was projected shadow maps like the characters cast in RE0.

But anyway, models still don't self-shadow. What I saw of Halo 2's cinematics (played through the city level, that was it) looked really good except for the texture pop-in. You'd think since they'd know ahead of time what they were going to render, they'd have it in RAM. Oh yeah, and some of the cutscene ran at like 10 fps.
 
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Hrm... something tells me this is incorrect. Nintendo's next system... providing it's GPU is basically using the Flipper architecture... should not even be capable of displacement mapping as you need to be able to do vertex texturing. As far as I know the Flipper GPU did not have any such capacity. Also... displacement mapping is not tesselation as displacement mapping basically takes a texture map and creates new geometry from that texture map on the object while tesselation basically creates new geometry that tries to "smooth" out polygonal objects (for example taking wheel composed of 12 polygons and make it 48 polygons instead using an algorithm.)

The afformentioned "embossing" sounds basically like bump mapping.

In any case... without some technical details on Nintendo's next system's GPU (something a little more detailed than an overclocked Flipper GPU) there is little we can discuss at the moment outside continued speculation on the system. And yea... I tend to agree with the previous poster in that this seems more related to the current GameCube and it's GPU... but then again if Nintendo's next system is using the Flipper then it should also relate to that also. Time will tell though...
 
Humm??

The GameMaster said:
Hrm... something tells me this is incorrect. Nintendo's next system... providing it's GPU is basically using the Flipper architecture... should not even be capable of displacement mapping as you need to be able to do vertex texturing. As far as I know the Flipper GPU did not have any such capacity.

Sounds like Displacement Mapping too me..............

Use of Displacement Maps
Use of Displacement Maps

To generate convincing, photo-real terrain, we decided to utilize and enhance the approach we had used on both Rogue Squadron and Battle For Naboo. Beginning in Photoshop, our level designers created very rough grayscale topographical images, with white representing our highest terrain elevation and black representing our lowest. The level designers' job was simply to rough out areas where gameplay was to occur. At that point, our grayscale images were turned over to Paul Topolos, our lead artist, who enhanced the images, mainly by incorporating terrain features from USGS satellite scans.

We then loaded our finished grayscale images into L3DEdit, which converted the images into displacement maps. Our artists created textures for the displacement maps, applied texture layers using an alpha-blending technique, and created bump maps, far-detail maps, and cloud shadow maps specific to each terrain type. Lighting on the landscape was applied by the game's rendering engine using a real-time light source.

By utilizing and enhancing a reliable, time-tested approach, we were able to avoid many of the pitfalls other developers have been trapped in when attempting to create convincing terrain. We didn't need to model highly detailed landscape tiles, nor did we need to create unique textures for those tiles. In addition, whenever we wanted to change aspects of our displacement maps, we were able to make those changes quickly, simply by altering our grayscale images or by changing the scale of the displacement map inside L3DEdit. There was no need to waste precious time hand tweaking or waiting for another artist to do the work. This allowed level designers great flexibility and direct control over the terrain and most importantly, no wait time.
 
The GameMaster said:
Hrm... something tells me this is incorrect. Nintendo's next system... providing it's GPU is basically using the Flipper architecture... should not even be capable of displacement mapping as you need to be able to do vertex texturing.

Rogue Leader and Rebel Strike both used displacement mapping, as stated in the Gamasutra articles. Granted, they weren't used to add a billion polygons, but they were displacement maps nonetheless. AFAIK, it's one of the few tricks Flipper could do that NV2--and by extension, no other contemporary chip--could at the time (the other I know was interleaving combiner and texture ops).

I'm still wondering if Factor 5 were simply programming gods or if the problem was just that no one else cared to give it that much effort. I can count on one hand the games that used any serious tricks available on the Flipper...okay, maybe two.
 
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If these developer comments regarding the hardware in the Rev are to be believed, then WHATEVER the Rev can do, the PS3/360 will be able to do it 10X's better/faster.

So I fail to see why this would be any kind of "Key factor" whatsoever.

Infact I remember Dave saying something in his Xenos article about how the Xenos was the first GPU he's seen which can actually handle displacement mapping in a single pass.
 
The GameMaster said:
Hrm... something tells me this is incorrect. Nintendo's next system... providing it's GPU is basically using the Flipper architecture... should not even be capable of displacement mapping as you need to be able to do vertex texturing. As far as I know the Flipper GPU did not have any such capacity.
Flipper is capable of displacement mapping, which you point out yourself later.
Also... displacement mapping is not tesselation as displacement mapping basically takes a texture map and creates new geometry from that texture map on the object while tesselation basically creates new geometry that tries to "smooth" out polygonal objects (for example taking wheel composed of 12 polygons and make it 48 polygons instead using an algorithm.)
Tessellation is the division of a plane into polygons. One form of tessellation is ATi's Truform, which, as you mentioned, creates more polygons to smooth out a low-polygon model.
The afformentioned "embossing" sounds basically like bump mapping.
Well, emboss means to create a design in relief. So embossing sounds more like raising the surface of a polygon so it can be still be seen at a right angle.

Right now all people can do is speculate. It's reasonable speculation, however, that Hollywood's design is similar to ATi's X1K architecture. Based on that, we can entertain what it will be capable of and have fun discussing it.
 
fearsomepirate said:
I'm still wondering if Factor 5 were simply programming gods or if the problem was just that no one else cared to give it that much effort. I can count on one hand the games that used any serious tricks available on the Flipper...okay, maybe two.

I can't wait too see Factor 5 "Lair" latest PS3 game build. :D
 
I should give props to Ubisoft for the Jade engine, a graphics engine which actually scales from the least to the most powerful console, instead of going the EA route and just straight porting PS2 games to the other two machines. I think Jade Engine games could look really beautiful when the thing is scaled up for Revolution.
 
even though Flipper, and thus Gamecube, can do a form of displacement mapping, maybe displacement mapping is being given a higher priority in Hollywood - Revolution. maybe some specific hardware / algorithm is being put into the 3D rendering pipeline this time, and better / more support in the API, tools, etc. So perhaps displacement mapping is going to be more important, more prominent in Revolution games.
 
the main concern is how rev provide an enviornment that let the developers cheaper to produce the games. if it simply because it's very similar to NGC and use SDTV as output, I would guess the cost should only a little lower than the NGC. As you look into the release list, NGC only get very few games from 3th party.
I would like to know whether the easy use of displayment mapping (assume rev design make it nearly free to use) can help the dev. to make games cheaper as its not only to make the surface/texture more realistic. any comment about this?
 
Which would take up more space in memory? Traditional geometry with lots of polygons, or a reduced geometry, with displacement maps to generate a greater number of polygons? I'm not sure how much memory is used for textures and how much is used for vertex data.

It's just a thought, but perhaps displacement mapping is a valid method for creating higher detailed models with Revolution's limited memory.
 
fearsomepirate said:
I'm still wondering if Factor 5 were simply programming gods or if the problem was just that no one else cared to give it that much effort. I can count on one hand the games that used any serious tricks available on the Flipper...okay, maybe two.


Why make the effort when none of the GCN owners would buy anything other than 1st party titles? If you make a 3rd party Nintendo game, you make it as cheaply as you possibly can because you know going in that it's going to get crappy sales.
 
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