Gaming graphics using atoms instead of polygons?

Darth Mawr

Sr Member
RPF PREMIUM MEMBER
I just found this video about a big leap in graphics technology and I'm not a gamer so I don't fully understand this technology. Is this for real? For those of you who understand this, what are they not telling us, i.e. what's the catch? Will this work on a everyday computer or are we talking about specialized equipment?

Games are going to get really realistic. [VIDEO]
 
I'd be guessing it would be super expensive and require special monitors if not even special graphic cards to manipulate things.
 
I don't know anything about games, but a quick goog around shows it's a real company with job listings for 3D programmers and Tools programmers and the like on linkedin and other sites. If it's a hoax, it's a pretty elaborate one.
 
Considering they're still keeping it completely in house at this point, it won't make the next level of console's. Even when the last gen of consoles came out, they used graphics hardware that wasn't at the top of the line for the current time's PC's.

Sounds like they use their engine to generate polys on the fly based on point clouds. Wouldn't suprise me either if it did a heavy amount of reduction based on distance. The levels you'd see high detail still dwarf anything around today though. And by gigantic amounts.

It does sound like they're working on a proof of concept still. If they're real and on the right track, i'd imagine it'd still be at least a couple years before it hit the market.
 
I'm betting it'll be the ps5 or ps 6 before we see this sort of thing in a console. I don't even want to think about the price tag.
 
That was an amazing video. I can't wait until the technology becomes useable to the general public. I don't play games, but I can see where it could come in handy in other aspects of technology.
 
How can this not be a memory hog? As others have said, this looks to be aimed at a console of some sort, but what would it take to work on an everyday PC/Mac? Also, what equipment is this company using and what are their render times? I just barely understand this technology enough to be intrigued by it but I'm trying to grasp if it will have any effect on everyday life or is it just going to be the future of gaming? I ask because this type of technology seems to be lead by the gaming companies and web development is lead by the porn industry.:lol So whether I indulge in either activity, I try to read up on it as it usually keeps me informed on technology advances.
 
As a worker in the gaming industry this looks really cool. I think I'll pass it around work to see what's up. In my opinion, we should just skip this small ball thing and go straight for the holodeck. =)
 
I really don't see how they'd work with actual atoms or even simply really small bits of something to create a solid. In the 3D world, you actually get killed by number of objects before you get killed by number of faces (polys) in a scene. So i'm not sure how they'd track trillions or quadrillions of atoms and have them adjust on your screen in realtime. SOMETHING has to account for the location of all the atoms/objects in relation to the camera in order to show different views. I'm interested in the concept, but there's not enough info on it to know if it's legit or not.
 
They didn't really explain the technology just basically "We took out the polygons and gave you unlimited detail". The idea is intriguing for sure, especially that they were able to get their demo rendered by software running at 20FPS (if it was running that smooth real-time and not pre-rendered). I wonder what kind of system they are running that demo from.
 
The problem with the technology is that it doesn't do anything other than what they show in those videos. Including animation. Those things can't move. And there's a fair bit of instancing going on in those videos.. it's not a million different rocks, it's a million copies of the same rock.

They're also ignoring the fact that poly-count is actually pretty low on the priority list when it comes to realism and "good graphics" in games these days. It's all about shaders and lighting to make the surface of the objects look real and behave like real objects. Games like Crysis and Battlefield 3 don't look the way they do because of how many polygons they have.

Even if this were magically implemented across the board, it would only serve to increase the effective polygon count, and the overall look of games wouldn't really change that much.

There are other things at work these days, like tessellation in DX11, that vastly increase the polygon count and the smoothness of objects, and results in a barely noticeable increase in the overall look of the game.

Dig around the 'net, you'll see a lot of feedback from actual developers that are pointing out all the problems that Mr. Unlimited isn't mentioning.

Yes, it's an intriguing idea, but the general consensus is that it won't really work within a game development environment because of its limitations.
 
This is definitely awesome to see. The only problem that I can think of is how resources intense using these graphics would be on a gaming/computer system. I'm running a decent system now and I have to be careful when I'm rendering things in 3Ds Max because it can cause crashes.
 
Back in my day, we used to call this "voxels" - short for "volumetric picture elements", meaning "pixels in 3D".
The idea is very old, but it does not scale very well, and it consumes a whole lot of processing power, usually. Many applications convert voxels into polygons so that they can be rendered more efficiently using available hardware.
In this demo, we saw basically many many copies of the same environment. Voxels consume memory. If the environment hadn't been this repetitive, it would have consumed much more memory.

One thing that is easy with polygons it called "shading": it can reflect incoming light depending on the angle of the light source and the angle of the observer. I saw no evidence of shading in this demo. It is also much easier to do animation with polygons. I saw no evidence of animation in this demo either.
 
I don't think a developer want to spend 10+ hours on making just 1 Super detailed scanned tree just because they can make it uber realistic.
 
While it looks and sounds good and indeed plausible I don't trust a site that has a permanent 'site suspended' page... Site Unavailable

I got that page by just typing in the address bar Site Unavailable and it redirected me to the suspend page... if this just sounding dodgy but is a real technology or is it a complete fantasy meant to drive us gamers round the bend?
 
It seems pretty legitimate and logical to me. Its biggest cons are the processing required to handle it, but that's something that will inevitably be solved in time. I think it's only a matter of time until we're playing in environments that are built completely from scratch. Each blade of grass has it's own AI to grow and spread. Each building is constructed from planks of wood and held together by nails that allow them to be destroyed in realistic graphics. The logic for all of this isn't impossible, it's simply the rendering/processing to do it is far to great.
 
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