spacemonkey
Newcomer
Nothing in the world moves - just the camera
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. No grass movement, no branches swaying in the breeze, no creatures wandering around, and what's with the water? If unlimited atoms are possible, why aren't we seeing 'atomic' water?
I know the obvious answer to that, but you'd hope they would temper it a bit in the face of what they're showing.
SVOs are very memory efficient (state of the art voxel rendering engines can compress
the memory footprint of one voxel down to one bit[1])
SVO has automatic level of detail. The further away the ray traverses, the lower quality data is used (we do not need to consider details that are smaller than one pixel). Just like in virtual texturing (or any mipmapping based graphics hardware), the required detail level (and required bandwidth) drops very rapidly as you start processing data further away from the camera. The working set in main memory can be surprisingly small. Similarly virtual texturing requires only 4096x4096 pixel cache to hold the current working set (for 720p resolution). Virtual textured game can manage with just 50 megabytes of graphics memory for all the textures. Similarly SVO can keep very narrow data set in memory, and stream new data on demand.It is so obvious that the algorithm he is using is extremely memory bandwith limited.
His excuse for the repetitive instances of models is just laughable and makes it obvious that his claims are fraudulent all the way.
I agree with most of his points. However SVOs only store voxels at the surface, not inside the objects. This cuts down his estimated memory requirement drastically. Also storing voxel colors as 24 bit uncompressed data sounds like overkill to me.Minecraft developer: It's a scam!
Rage requires 3 DVDs and it only has unique (pretty low res) texturing everywhere. A full game world with unique geometry detail everywhere would exceed all storage media sizes by far.
Which is probably the main reason why Carmack has abandoned the tech after testing it in 2008-2009. Most likely all their trouble with the Rage datasets was another factor.
Virtual texturing and tessellation/displacement would only require another texture layer, 16 bits are more than enough; I'd consider it a far more efficient representation of geometry data as well.
Especially because you can deform this geometry easily, and just because you can bake lighting into the color layer you don't necessarily have to, it can also work with dynamic lighting too.
Then again maybe it is really better for some stuff, we'll see once we have at least 100 GB of background storage for a game...
Yeah... Listening to his QuakeCon 2011 Keynote, it sounds like he doesn't want to jump into another scenario where he is trying to figure out how to realistically implement the tech. That entire Keynote was basically an extended discussion on the nightmares of making MegaTextures work for a REAL game, not just a theoretical one where ideal conditions are satisfied. I imagine he sort of sat back, looked at the idea of using SVOs and then said " No."Camrack may not have made such a straight statement about voxels, but the facts are that Rage doesn't use them, Doom4 won't be using them, and whatever their next engine iteration is going to be, it won't be using them either (as it's going to be just an iteration of tech 5 instead of starting from scratch).
Modern GPUs can do Voxels moderately well honestly... Not incredible, but decently.So how efficiently do modern GPUs render with Voxels?
Also is animation the main reason why voxels aren't used?