Thoughts about REYES approach, PlayStation 3 and Visualizer

[Squeak]

Sorry but are you discounting the importance of good textures? With 10980X polygons, 982X particles and MGS2 like textures, games still wont look photorealistic....

100k polys per frame (average PS2 game) -> 10980x =~ 1bilion per frame.
Or about 3000polys per pixel in 640x480.
You actually expect anyone to use textures with subpixel precision that high? 8)

Wouldn’t you still need to colour the micropolys from a texturemap?

 

[Fafalada]

Chap's post very clearly states "10980X polygons"... there is no micro or mention of any other form of tesselation.
I was led to believe this means raw polygon models from MGS2 with 10980x higher polygon density.

 

[Squeak]

To render it real time at 60fps, it needs a computer with 30*60*60 (108000) times the MIPS computer that rendered it.

Using Moore's law, processing power doubles every 18 months, we have around 13 * 18 months since 1984 ((2003-1984)*12).

2 to the power of 13 equates to 8192 which is a far cry from 108000.

And further more, the environment is rather static (the leaves and grass don't move) and the 2 characters are rather simple even compare to today's console games.

I will not settle for this quality nowadays for sure.

Good point about the static backgrounds, they do look like they could have been preerendred, (although Lasseter is known to be against excessive camera movement for the sake of it) but there is some camera movement at the beginning, that shows that they could move those particle trees if they wanted.
I know the characters are geometrically simple, but what simplicity! Because of the Reyes rendering, there isn’t a single polygon or texel showing.

Today’s hardware is much more specialized and optimised than yesteryears, that coupled with development in tools and shortcuts in the rendering process, I don’t think that a real-time version, of something at least approaching the technical quality of the above movie, would be completely unfeasible on today’s hardware.
But when PS3 with its x1000 power arrives, there is no doubt that it will be. Just look at what is possible on an Athlon 600 in software, with 3½ minutes of rendering: http://jrman.sourceforge.net/Spacex.png
Anyway I brought the movie up as an example that good image quality is possible even at lower resolutions.

 

[maskrider]

Good point about the static backgrounds, they do look like they could have been preerendred, (although Lasseter is known to be against excessive camera movement for the sake of it) but there is some camera movement at the beginning, that shows that they could move those particle trees if they wanted.
I know the characters are geometrically simple, but what simplicity! Because of the Reyes rendering, there isn?t a single polygon or texel showing.

Today?s hardware is much more specialized and optimised than yesteryears, that coupled with development in tools and shortcuts in the rendering process, I don?t think that a real-time version, of something at least approaching the technical quality of the above movie, would be completely unfeasible on today?s hardware.
But when PS3 with its x1000 power arrives, there is no doubt that it will be. Just look at what is possible on an Athlon 600 in software, with 3½ minutes of rendering: http://jrman.sourceforge.net/Spacex.png
Anyway I brought the movie up as an example that good image quality is possible even at lower resolutions.

Well, I sure agree that good image quality is definitely not limited by lower resolutions.

I will be extremely happy if <insert whatever next gen console> will do Toy Story 2 in real time, or very close to it. But I didn't expect any miracle as good 3D models and art content are still the keys than just tech numbers.

Most games do not have the budget of the big budget CG movies. I don't expect to see anything super great except may be tech demo.

 

[chaphack]

Cmon faf, i was just picking a random number...