This sort of thing is what I expect next-gen...

[Lazy8s]

Expecting the polish of pre-rendered CG to come along with its complexity will lead to disappointment in all but a few games next generation.

Some of those DC to Xbox comparisons make for an interesting study:

In the full court view, Virtua Tennis does look better than Top Spin. It animates more fluidly to the point of looking like a photoreal broadcast at times when the shadows creep over the stadium. The close-ups of the players and the courts' surfacing show noticeable improvement for Top Spin, though.

JSR is more vibrant than JSRF, but yeah... JSRF is way more detailed (especially considering the framerate). It may be the most technically outstanding game this generation.

F355 is a better example of the system than SEGA GT.

MSR was rather botched from a visual standpoint.

And Dreamcast games were made a long time ago, of course. But I think JSR to JSRF shows the difference between DC and Xbox most aptly.

 

[Sonic]

I don't think it's entirely out of question that graphics like in the movie you linked to will be impossible next gen. In order to achieve the LOD there may be a need to move to HOS rendering at least for the landscape. If there is a nice enough FSAA for consoles and developers take advantage of it then I believe it will happen.

The best thing I can tell you is to wait for Sony's PS3 demoes. The PS2 has far outclassed its initial tech demoes and if a PS3 tech demo is anything like the movie presented ehre then I have little doubt any of the next gen machines will beable to do it.

Far Cry on a Radeon 9800 Pro doesn't matter right now since the game isn't optimized for a fixed target where the developer knows exactly what to expect and what he/she will get form the hardware. Far Cry is optimized in a different way in that it is supposed to perform well on a range of graphics card with varying levels of graphics. With that said I think the game will be trounced next gen in the graphics department simply because there will be much more available processing power. Remember, the farther we go on the better hardware makers (NV, ATI) will be able to make shaders that much more better. Only now have we seen such a focus on shaders but by the time R500 rolls around it may end up having shader performance tripled or quadrupled what we have today. Also take RAM limitations into account and how much Windows eats up and all other resources. In a console all of that is minimized and you can focus on exactly what you want to with said memory.

 

[zidane1strife]

The best thing I can tell you is to wait for Sony's PS3 demoes. The PS2 has far outclassed its initial tech demoes and if a PS3 tech demo is anything like the movie presented ehre then I have little doubt any of the next gen machines will beable to do it.

Since, they're giving us workstations by the end of this year, it'd be nice if they'd at least give some xna-esque demos during the unveiling(which should be some time prior.)...

 

[London Geezer]

When did Sony start to show PS2 demos? I mean, how long before PS2 release... Just need to know so i don't hold my breath, seeing they're taking it easy... Not like they're going to be indicative of PS3 power, either because they will be crap compared to real PS3 games (like it happened with PS2) or because they'll be too good to be represented in real games (like it happened with the other consoles overall) but it's always nice to see what's gonna come in the future.

 

[zidane1strife]

When did Sony start to show PS2 demos? I mean, how long before PS2 release... Just need to know so i don't hold my breath, seeing they're taking it easy... Not like they're going to be indicative of PS3 power, either because they will be crap compared to real PS3 games (like it happened with PS2) or because they'll be too good to be represented in real games (like it happened with the other consoles overall) but it's always nice to see what's gonna come in the future.

March of 1999, IIRC. One year before launch, that means if the same holds for ps3 even with a 2006 launch date it'll be this fiscal yr.

 

[London Geezer]

When did Sony start to show PS2 demos? I mean, how long before PS2 release... Just need to know so i don't hold my breath, seeing they're taking it easy... Not like they're going to be indicative of PS3 power, either because they will be crap compared to real PS3 games (like it happened with PS2) or because they'll be too good to be represented in real games (like it happened with the other consoles overall) but it's always nice to see what's gonna come in the future.

March of 1999, IIRC. One year before launch, that means if the same holds for ps3 even with a 2006 launch date it'll be this fiscal yr.

And the financial year has just begun, so we could end up waiting even one whole year before seeing anything.. Oh well i did say i aint gonna hold my breath after all... Although, PS3 demos might come out before FF12 does here in Europe! That's a step forward! Actually, PS3 itself might come out before FF12 is released in Europe!

 

[Farid]

Far Cry on a Radeon 9800 Pro doesn't matter right now since the game isn't optimized for a fixed target where the developer knows exactly what to expect and what he/she will get form the hardware. Far Cry is optimized in a different way in that it is supposed to perform well on a range of graphics card with varying levels of graphics. With that said I think the game will be trounced next gen in the graphics department simply because there will be much more available processing power. Remember, the farther we go on the better hardware makers (NV, ATI) will be able to make shaders that much more better. Only now have we seen such a focus on shaders but by the time R500 rolls around it may end up having shader performance tripled or quadrupled what we have today. Also take RAM limitations into account and how much Windows eats up and all other resources. In a console all of that is minimized and you can focus on exactly what you want to with said memory.

I second that, and when you know that FarCry uses only 3x less shaders than Half Life² (which runs @60fps @1024 on a "simple" R360) for example, you easily could imagine that a console (with its "locked specs") with more computational power than today's high ends GCs could top any recent games , especially at 640x480.

I also agree that a good implementation of LOD techniques could do miracles when it comes to realtime rendering .
The next-gen could/will come to the point where there'll be a lot of polys<pixels on screen (@640x480, of course), if you add to that a nice HOS, i believe that polygons won't be the primary problem next-gen.
Lightings techniques will need most of the work, if developers are looking for CGI look in realtime, and when you see some of the "recent" (everything is "relative") breakthroughs on HDR, SHL, Stencils Shadows etc, and if developers couple thoses with some shaders (soft shadowing techniques,...), CGI look won't be far off. IMHO.

 

[London Geezer]

Unreal Engine 3 is already looking mighty good, some of the things it does are amazing. And it's still "only" pushing less than 10k polygons per characters, looking as good as it does. Seeing how consoles are focusing more and more on polygons, and at the same time keeping the increase in shaders, we will definately see mighty nice things come next generation...

To anyone who hasn't seen the Unreal Engine 3 (NOT Unreal 3) presentation video at E3, please do yourself a favour, you need to see it.

 

[jvd]

I think what many of you are missing from my example is the crazy intense a.i in farcry. This a.i is really next gen a.i and the best i've ever seen in game.

I expect at least the same quality a.i as in farcry on the next gen and that is what eats away at farcrys graphics.

Whats the point of teraflop cpus if a.i is going to stay as stupid as it was in this gen .

 

[Lazy8s]

The apparent intelligence of AI is often the result of design and behavior balance more than the amount of processing resources which were allocated to it.

But I think top-end PC titles like Far Cry are actually more advanced than some give them credit for considering the resolution and sampling levels for IQ they can run.

 

[Lazy8s]

Since it's always getting thrown around here: PS2 surpassed most of its demo work. However, there aren't many PS2 games with characters as intricate as in the Final Fantasy ballroom showing nor was there use of that quality specular effect from the GT2000 build, so it's not like games have cleared the kind of graphics suggested by those demos by some big margin.

 

[Fafalada]

However, there aren't many PS2 games with characters as intricate as in the Final Fantasy ballroom showing nor was there use of that quality specular effect from the GT2000 build

If you ever actually saw that first GT2k demo you wouldn't even mention it in comparison to any PS2 racing game. Even Type-S looked considerably better then that, car surface included.

 

[Lazy8s]

I mentioned the specular effect specifically. Looked at a very CGish quality. The rest of the build, like the trackside detail, wasn't very good - I agree.

 

[Fafalada]

Looked at a very CGish quality

On that 4k*4k screenshot maybe. Not in the actual demo.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I cannot wait until characters start getting really high polygon counts, rather than low polygon count with just bumb mapping and pixel shader effects. that is went games will start looking more like lowend CG.

 

[Lazy8s]

Since the consoles are fixed platforms and dated several years back, we're not really seeing many normal-mapped characters. And the whole point of them is that you don't see much difference when they've been well executed. The big change for high geometry will be in the way in which the models act, behave, and interact in things like deformation.

 

[DeanoC]

The question I'd ask is when real-time are going to be this good. This is way better than most CG work.

Triple Product Wavelet Integrals for All-Frequency Relighting. http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/allfreqmat/

5 seconds to relight this scene!, look at the shadows

Hanrahan and Ramamoorthi are the guys to watch for lighting stuff. Given we only need a 300x increase in speed to make that real-time...

 

[Fafalada]

The question I'd ask is when real-time are going to be this good.

I imagine by the time we can afford those storage requirements the computing power will be up there too. Did you look at the space used for that table scene?

Definately looks great though, would make one heck of a techdemo for PS3

 

[aaaaa00]

The question I'd ask is when real-time are going to be this good. This is way better than most CG work.

Triple Product Wavelet Integrals for All-Frequency Relighting. http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/allfreqmat/

5 seconds to relight this scene!, look at the shadows

Hanrahan and Ramamoorthi are the guys to watch for lighting stuff. Given we only need a 300x increase in speed to make that real-time...

Ren Ng (one of the three co-authors of the paper) was an intern at MS last year, working with Peter-Pike Sloan of Microsoft Graphics Research.

They're working on some amazing stuff at Microsoft.

 

[Crazyace]

The question I'd ask is when real-time are going to be this good. This is way better than most CG work.

Triple Product Wavelet Integrals for All-Frequency Relighting. http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/allfreqmat/

5 seconds to relight this scene!, look at the shadows

Hanrahan and Ramamoorthi are the guys to watch for lighting stuff. Given we only need a 300x increase in speed to make that real-time...

Although all of the Precomputed radiance stuff is really nice for those camera
flybys of still screens It all starts to fall apart a bit if large amounts of geometry are animating.. as the inherent self occlusion and higher order reflection/shadowing changes. Its good for technical demos, and another tool to use in games, but not a complete panacea.. roll on proper real time radiosity instead...