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Nvidia tech demo's and why do we not see this in games?

Gregster

Gregster

Gregster

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Sooooo I am bored waiting for Thurdsay to arrive, so done a bit of trawling and came across the tech demo's of Nvidia and putting it honestly, they are stunning but why are we not seeing these effects in games yet?


As you can see, realistic leaves lighting and hair but I have not seen this in any game as of yet. This was released 8 months ago and I would expect to see some kind of utilisation now.


840,000 strands of hair being rendered but still nothing that I know of showing this in any game. Realtime particle simulation looks fantastic and will be in the Unreal engine 4 but I have not seen anything showing these kind of effects.


Advanced fluid simulation.


Fluid and particle simulation in realtime.

And finaly, we have the Unreal Engine 4 show casing the drop dead gorgeous elemental demo. Hopefully the shape of things to come.


compared to the PS4 variant


Cmon game devs, give us what we deserve please :)
 
Largely the above a lot of the mainstream developers are fully console focused these days. There are some more obscure games that use some versions of these effects but they are mostly both obscure and utterly rubbish i.e. see passion leads army for example, theres also a Korean game that uses a lot of that tech, the name escapes me, but basically slaps it on over the top of what is otherwise a late 1990s tech/gameplay mechanics based game heh.
 
I thought it was all down to the number of resources available when rendering a game in real time.
Those tech demos are showing single effects with nothing else running.
 
i can think of a number of reasons why games don't look like demos.
1. production time and money
2. in the case of proprietary features, developers would be investing a significant amount of said time and money on a technology aimed at less than half of gamers
3. majority of gamers don't have good enough hardware
4. the demos sometimes just show a single object that is immensely complex. in a game you'd also have backgrounds and environments to render
5. we possibly need the backing of next gen consoles in order to see such effects in actual games (further to this, all next gen consoles use amd hardware)
6. nvidia has a bad reputation for cooperation with devs. could this be an issue?

i'm all for progress and features and game realism. thing is physx has been around for a long time and frankly hardly any games use it, and only a handful of titles really seem to shine with it. maybe it is just a gimmick as it exists now? too many resources needed for something not many people can use/care about?
 
Epic's test platform for the development of Unreal Engine 4 was tri-SLI 580s. :)

I think it's a combination of all the points people have already made, plus lead times on new technologies are rather long. It takes at least 3 years to make a proper AAA game from scratch and if good tools aren't available that makes the tech kinda moot.
 
I can see consoles have the lions share of dev time but we do get some PC exclusives (not many) and I would be interested to know how many PC owners are actual PC Gamers.

I will go look for PC sales compared to PS3 sales for example.
 
because big chunks of what happens in tech demos are actually pre-rendered instead of actually being applied in realtime

sure you can download the techdemo and run it, but a lot of the lighting effects that look rendered are actually pre-rendered and applied to textures and then when you render it "live" on your PC all your machine is really doing is applying pre-rendered textures instead of actually re-calculating all of the lighting effects on the fly

just look at the Unreal 3.5 "Samaritan" demo - that was released nearly a year ago as well and yet most of what you see in there has still not made it in to a live production game yet - it will be another year or so before we see any Unreal 4 games on PC

there were lots of comments about how the sub-surface scattering was not actually being done in real time and they admitted as much but said that the engine *could* do it live if we really wanted to
 
Steam doesn't release sales figures does it? That is moronic tbh and hurting the PC, it allows pubs to continue sidelining PC gamers in favour of trendy rubbish like consoles and *shudder* mobile gaming.
 
andybird123 said:
because big chunks of what happens in tech demos are actually pre-rendered instead of actually being applied in realtime
Click to expand...

The nVidia demos like dawn, etc. are all using realtime computed lighting, etc. rather than lightmaps, tho its true that a lot of demos do use high resolution pre-baked light/shadow maps for stuff that you would never see from a situation where the lighting would change.

Its one thing that dissapoints me a bit with unreal engine - when you start pulling the showcases, etc. apart in UDK you can see just how much is (and isn't) faked up.
 
I'm still waiting to see truly round wheels, demoed from the Geforce Ti4600 days!
 
andybird123 said:
because big chunks of what happens in tech demos are actually pre-rendered instead of actually being applied in realtime

sure you can download the techdemo and run it, but a lot of the lighting effects that look rendered are actually pre-rendered and applied to textures and then when you render it "live" on your PC all your machine is really doing is applying pre-rendered textures instead of actually re-calculating all of the lighting effects on the fly

just look at the Unreal 3.5 "Samaritan" demo - that was released nearly a year ago as well and yet most of what you see in there has still not made it in to a live production game yet - it will be another year or so before we see any Unreal 4 games on PC

there were lots of comments about how the sub-surface scattering was not actually being done in real time and they admitted as much but said that the engine *could* do it live if we really wanted to
Click to expand...

They aren't pre-rendered. What you are talking about is pre-baked textures, and they are very much used in games.

It's not about cheating or anything like that, it's about efficiency
 
The same reason we never see Prototype cars in the high street showroom.

Its just showing off, its marketing, whether or not such things are feasible in the real world is an entirely different matter.
 
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