WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?

The applications shown in games are anything but exciting so far, and so is the concept of buying yet another multi-hundred dollar piece of hardware. I'd like to see what I have actually used before I invest in yet more "exciting" hardware. Physics cards have started off as basically gimmicks if what has arrived is all Ageia can pull off for an all-important first impression.

I'm just not convinced that game devs can come up with compelling uses for physics. It all feels very businessy right now, as in lots of big ideas with very little concrete results. They want us to buy based on ideas. And, since I've read and have been told quite enough about Reality Coprocessors and Emotion Synthesizers, I'm more than slightly skeptical.

I'm also not convinced anymore by the idea that physics can enhance gaming. Half Life 2 did some cool stuff, but now we seem to be at a total stand still. BTW, I've seen flight models on 486s that are entirely convincing (Flight Unlimited). I think it would be cool to see a "game" simulate an alternate reality, where newtonian physics isn't happening, but that seems like asking too much from game devs as it's more than a bit complex (and assumes that game devs can even simulate what we have right here on earth lol).

These announcements by ATI and NV, with their GPUs being said to be physics capable, feel an awful lot like bandwagon marketing. Buzz. Burning up GPU cycles on physics also seems like a wonderful way to make us all need to upgrade quicker (gee, in whose best interests is that?) My next graphics card will have its work cut out trying to render 1920x1200. I don't want it working on other nonsense too (especially effect physics with zippo interaction).

 

swaaye, are you trying to derail the thread purposefully or you just don't get the topic?

 

So your talking about super powerful PPU's for the PC market? Well I wouldn't really argue with that since I haven't thought much about it. But that's not the only way to use a dedicated physics processor. How about a more moderate dedicated physics chip made simply to provide the kind of physics power you can already get from a reasonable powerful CPU but at a lower cost? My point is a dedicated physics processor is going to be cheaper and run cooler then a CPU with the same physics power, so its hardly just a buzz word.

 

If that's all real time then yeah it does look very good, the polygon counts look extremely high from what I can see. Unfortunately the video quality isn't very good so its hard to tell for sure.

 

Are you kidding? Easily 10x better, the gamecube pokemon games looked like dreamcast games with some blending effects thrown in, the character models were ripped right from the n64 version of the game...along with the sound effects. And yet it still ran at 30fps, despite the low quality textures, low poly models, and barely exploiting the feature set of the cube. Looks like they've given the pokemon some actual quality animation, and the lighting is just what the pokemon universe always needed, very much in the style of the CG elements from the movies. Well, it needed the lighting or fur shading, I still want my fuzzy pikachu .
BTW, that pokemon video could also be a poor render mockup, though it does look just like higher poly pokemon models with lots of shiny shine (but not bump mapping).

Won't it be hard to reduce costs on the controller, given its mechanical complexity?

I'd say 4x a flipper could do it, which is what the latest rumor says, right? I mean, this pokemon game makes heavier use of lighting than Rebel Strike (or even any xbox game, at least in-game, some real time cinematics on xbox might do that much), and even double the level of rebel strike I don't think would bring us to this..maybe halve the framerate to do it, but I doubt whatever developer is doing a next gen pokemon game is even able to match Factor 5's technical expertise. If we go by how the gamecube pokemon games turned out, Wii must have a 20 fold increase over the cube.

Why bother? Cpus would soon eclipse it in power, and be easier to program for.
How about we just let the left over shading power of our gpus be used for physics, and we can still just buy faster graphics cards as needed?

 

Pokemon does look very good, crisp and high quality. We need highres grabs for AA whcih'd be nice. And also bear in mind there's very little there other than the characters, so they can blow a lot of poly's on the them. Lighting looks very good indeed, but the vid is too fuzzy to determine how much is realtime and how much is prebaked are GI maps. So really, we're advanced no more than ever! Still, despite being minimalistic, it's definitely a quality above what we've seen so far IMO. Perhaps this is targetting the final hardware, where other games have been targetted on SDK performance? I look forward to some better pics!

 

Pokemon Collosseum


Pokemon Battle


Much higher polygon count, much better lighting, self-shadowing, etc. This is very encouraging.

 

If Pokemon gfx can be made in large scale (complex scenarios, many chracters, physics, good AI ...ie in most games) I will be Ok it that (like I said for RS trailer).

About HW physics , dont matter the PC side, we want good physics in wii if we can get them from both ways then the cheaper is probably the best.

I can see the loss because of the marketing Wi-fi and such, as it is a hugh investiment whatever are the the product, if you are going for this kind of product then it should be easy to lost money.

 

The 20 fold increase wasn't serious, just that the pokemon games on gamecube were done very poorly, and that if the same effort was applied to the Wii games, they'd need 20x the power to look that good.

 

Yeah, so I was looking at this
http://cubemedia.ign.com/cube/image/nintendoconf_051403_274.jpg
and this
http://cubemedia.ign.com/cube/image/nintendoconf_051403_273.jpg
and thinking "WTF? Who thinks that's a high polycount?" Then I realized those were from Colisseum. It's honestly hard to tell anything from those Wii screens.

Edit Just downloaded the video, and that was impressive. This is clearly way more than "Gamecube 1.5." Well, I guess it's always possible that this is Nintendo's "Killzone 2," but that's not typical for them. The self-shadowing was very reminiscent of the Red Steel trailer.

 

You're making sense, but I've played a crapload of GC games, and this just looks fantastic. I never saw self-shadowing like that on Cube, the lighting on the whale is gorgeous, the animation is ridiculously smooth, and I never saw something cut into the ground the way that red dinosaur's breath did. I'm not comparing this to the other Pokemon game, which I've never played. I'm comparing it to Baten Kaitos, Prime 2, Tales of Symphonia, Resident Evil 0/4, etc.

 

You can't buy a faster graphics card for a console though I wasn't talking about PC systems, which is totally off topic, I was trying to point at a possible use in a cost concious system such as Wii.

 

Ah, ok then, VU0 it is.