Time warp! Was the Raven demo real-time or CGI?

[GwymWeepa]

I'll link to an old beyond 3d article here: http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12119&highlight=raven+xbox+demo

Was the Raven demo shown back in E3 2000 real-time or CGI? If it was real-time, was it running on Xbox hardware, or something more advanced? Does anyone have any definitive info?

I contend that it is not running in real-time, and if it were, then certainly not on actual xbox hardware, the poly counts are just too high on that robot, and both characters seem to be self-shadowing, and seem to be lit per-pixel. I'd go so far as to say that I haven't seen a model as advanced as that robot, with all those effects in terribly many modern games, and won't for sometime (well Xenon should be able to generate that easily within a game context).

 

[Bohdy]

Oh not this again.

I thought that the very thread you linked would have answered the question that you are posing? At any rate, why does it *still* matter?

 

[GwymWeepa]

Oh not this again.

I thought that the very thread you linked would have answered the question that you are posing? At any rate, why does it *still* matter?

They keep referring to the Raven demo as CGI, but does anyone know for sure? I was told the demo was showed off and that the camera angles could be changed, does that mean it was real-time, or were they simply switching between CGI footage?

 

[ERP]

Oh not this again.

I thought that the very thread you linked would have answered the question that you are posing? At any rate, why does it *still* matter?

They keep referring to the Raven demo as CGI, but does anyone know for sure? I was told the demo was showed off and that the camera angles could be changed, does that mean it was real-time, or were they simply switching between CGI footage?

There were two versions of the demo, the first one shown was CGI and noted as such, there was a realtime version I believe it was shown later. The difference is obvious if you see it up close, AA is completly different.

 

[GwymWeepa]

Oh not this again.

I thought that the very thread you linked would have answered the question that you are posing? At any rate, why does it *still* matter?

They keep referring to the Raven demo as CGI, but does anyone know for sure? I was told the demo was showed off and that the camera angles could be changed, does that mean it was real-time, or were they simply switching between CGI footage?

There were two versions of the demo, the first one shown was CGI and noted as such, there was a realtime version I believe it was shown later. The difference is obvious if you see it up close, AA is completly different.

Ahh, thank you kindly. Now, is the AA all that's different, is the real-time demo nearly as detailed, does it have similar poly counts and lighting?

 

[Jacob]

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12119&highlight=raven+nv15

 

[Guden Oden]

Now, is the AA all that's different

Bill Gates would have peed his pants with glee if that had been the case. No, the second realtime demo looked like crap in comparison in every respect, as would be expected as it ran on a geforce 2.

The final xbox hardware could have done the same thing better of course, but not that much better. It still wouldn't have come close to the original CGI movie (which wasn't all that good by todays' standards anyway, and besides, Raven looked like a man with tits and hips IMO, it was pretty scary! ).

 

[GwymWeepa]

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12119&highlight=raven+nv15

I already linked that, I figuered there was a real-time version actually running a geforce 3, guess not

 

[Jacob]

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12119&highlight=raven+nv15

I already linked that, I figuered there was a real-time version actually running a geforce 3, guess not

Sorry, I just read the thread title and this part:

Now, is the AA all that's different, is the real-time demo nearly as detailed, does it have similar poly counts and lighting?

AFAIK there's no raven demo running on actual Xbox hardware. I'd have liked to see that too.

 

[Akumajou]

Does anyone care to compare the RAVEN CGI demo to MechAssault 2's realtime cutscenes?

I feel that MA2's realtime cutscenes are pretty damn close to the RAVEN CGI demo, but thats just me.

 

[sunscar]

Never seen the latter all the way through, but it's pretty much an apples to oranges comparison. One's a CG cinema, the other is a real-time cinematic. The two can't really be more dissimilar. If by compare, you mean over-all asset similarities... I.E. if you were doing both in realtime what would you have in front of you. In one (Mech Assault 2 cinemas) you have 10,000 poly characters up close with a small number of shader effects applied, or eight bit textures... all 3D geometric assets on screen would ammount to around maybe 50,000 to 100,000 polygons per frame at 30 frames per second. If you were attempting to reproduce the Raven demo in a similar fassion then you'd require anywhere from 80,000 (similar to Ruby maybe?) polys to 200,000 polys (sub "Dusk" level) just for the pilot, then another 200,000 or more for the robot, and likely 30,000 to 50,000 for the environment (was a very closed and blurred environment) bringing the total to a max of 450,000 polys per frame at 30 frames per second with far, far more advanced shaders applied than were applied in the Mech Assault 2 cinematics. Even if you had that, you're still not perfectly spot-on (what about tesselation?, what about accurate lighting? Physics?). This would be more like the equivalent of a Nalu-type tech demo, but it would still require something greater than any Radeon X800 or any Geforce6800 to run at an acceptable frame rate (and still not be completely as good as the CG version).

Later

 

[AlNom]

Does anyone care to compare the RAVEN CGI demo to MechAssault 2's realtime cutscenes?

I feel that MA2's realtime cutscenes are pretty damn close to the RAVEN CGI demo, but thats just me.

I was mighty impressed with them. Natalia > Raven.

 

[Megadrive1988]

the original Raven-Robot sequence shown in March of 2000 at Xbox's announcement was completely pre-rendered CGI.


a few months later at E3 2000, there was a realtime version running on NV15 ~ GeForce2 GTS. it looked to be about 1/5 ~ one fifth ~ 20 percent the quality of the original CGI version, overall. at least to my eyes. maybe not even that. maybe only 1/10th. regardless of the exact percentage that the realtime version was compared to the CGI, it was not even close.

the actual NV2A powered Xbox could certainly do a better realtime version than what was done on NV15, but Xbox could never rival the CGI version in terms of rendering quality. not even in a non-interactive cutscene sequence. I'm guessing that the best that Xbox could do is about 1/4 ~ one fourth as good as the CGI.

I'd expect Xenon could easily handle the CGI Robot-Raven demo, at least to the point where it doesnt look too different. the more recent realtime ATI DoubleCross aka Ruby demo running on R420 ~ Radeon X800 looks fairly close to the pre-rendered CGI version of DoubleCross aka Ruby. especially to the untrained eye, like mine. and the Xenon will be even more powerful as far as CPU and VPU, so I expect very lowend CGI visuals on Xenon at least in non interactive cut-scenes.

Are next-gen consoles going to push graphics that rival average CGI ? no, but they will blurr the line somewhat.

 

[sunscar]

That, I can agree with. These next gen machines could deffinately accomplish something that looked similar if not even better than the Raven demo in realtime, but yeah... limit that expectation to tech demos and realtime cutscenes maybe.

Sidenote: Originally, from microsoft execs, Raven was supposed to represent one fourth the rendering capability of the Xblock. Falls over laughing, turns blue, dies with a smile.

Later

 

[Megadrive1988]

Sidenote: Originally, from microsoft execs, Raven was supposed to represent one fourth the rendering capability of the Xblock. Falls over laughing, turns blue, dies with a smile.

yep, exactly. pathetic huh

 

[GwymWeepa]

That, I can agree with. These next gen machines could deffinately accomplish something that looked similar if not even better than the Raven demo in realtime, but yeah... limit that expectation to tech demos and realtime cutscenes maybe.

Nah, I think it could be done in real-time in typical game-play, I think MS will wow with the Xenon.

 

[Megadrive1988]

That, I can agree with. These next gen machines could deffinately accomplish something that looked similar if not even better than the Raven demo in realtime, but yeah... limit that expectation to tech demos and realtime cutscenes maybe.

Nah, I think it could be done in real-time in typical game-play, I think MS will wow with the Xenon.

that might be possible with the right development effort. like RE4 on GCN but nextgen. the typical PC or current gen console port-job to Xenon won't provide Raven CGI graphics. only built from the ground up games that are truly nextgen have that potential. or potentially have that potential.

 

[GwymWeepa]

That, I can agree with. These next gen machines could deffinately accomplish something that looked similar if not even better than the Raven demo in realtime, but yeah... limit that expectation to tech demos and realtime cutscenes maybe.

Nah, I think it could be done in real-time in typical game-play, I think MS will wow with the Xenon.

that might be possible with the right development effort. like RE4 on GCN but nextgen. the typical PC or current gen console port-job to Xenon won't provide Raven CGI graphics. only built from the ground up games that are truly nextgen have that potential. or potentially have that potential.

Well yeah I'd certainly imagine so.

 

[sunscar]

The rub to the whole thing is this. If we want to reproduce that kind of quality on more than just that very limited environment we're going to need lots of power. Even the best new video cards probably wouldn't run my fantastical 450,000 - 500,000 poly tech demo version of the Raven demo at more than 20-30 frames per second. For a decently complex scene you're going to need more characters, a larger environment, hundreds or even thousands of point lights to simulate GI. So we're going to need more power than what we have now. How much? I dunno. If we assume ten characters on screen and each character is 400,000 polys it doesn't mean we have four million polys visible. If our machine drives 400,000 polys per frame at 30 frames per second it doesn't mean we need ten times the geometric performance to draw our scene with 10 x 400,000 poly characters (LOD and culling). It'd be really difficult to say for sure right now if you could do anything more than a tech-demo-level fighting game on PS3/Xbox2?Revolution at the moment. There's so much we really need to know before we can make that judgement, and it's very complicated. Will we have enough RAM for geometry/textures/shaders? If not, will there be some clever work-around so we can have five million polys in every frame/sixteen shader-textures per poly? What will we get from the massive performance of these new SMP on Die CPUs? Will we get a system where low poly cages import to the GPU then get subdivided? Will the CPUs take up all vertex processing? Will we be able to create and destroy geometry at will? Effective culling?


Eh, sleepless ranting right about now.

Later

Iridius Dio