Unlimited Detail

  • Thread starter Thread starter uv
  • Start date Start date
I'm dubious about this... first of all the name, "unlimited detail" which is extremely misleading at best. From what I gathered of that article your highly detailed object has to be replicated as many times as necessary to construct a scene, therefore whilst the object might be highly detailed the over all scene loses detail via repitition the larger it becomes. Secondly, even on the individual object, it doesn't have "unlimited" detail, it is very limited by the resolution you're going to be viewing the object within as well as most importantly the CPU time available to render it at a reasonable frame rate, which if it were available in anyway you wouldn't be seeing £400 graphics cards designed to crunch all those beautiful polygons we all know and love.
 
Some group always seem to try and make a voxel comeback every now and then, the last big game to use them was pretty good from what I remember, can't for the life of me recall it's name offhand, had a few Stargate type elements to it IIRC.
 
Dano said:
Some group always seem to try and make a voxel comeback every now and then, the last big game to use them was pretty good from what I remember, can't for the life of me recall it's name offhand, had a few Stargate type elements to it IIRC.
Click to expand...

Outcast :)

outcastd007yj9.jpg
 
Novalogic were a big user of voxels in the Detla Force early games, but it took a decent machine to run at any decent resolution to gain the benifit.
 
Yes, a lot of game engines (if not all) will use voxels for some very specific function... but take Crysis as an example thrown up, as nice as that game looks I would say the terrain is extremely far away from having an unlimited level of detail.
 
Monolith did a lot of this in the pre-NOLF2 days, e.g. SHOGO:MAD and Blood.

Voxel technology unfortunately came along at the wrong time, the late 90s when the 3d accelerator industry was starting to boom. We have so much GPU power these days that using voxels would be a bit of a waste really.
 
Unlimited is a word that simply cannot and never will apply in the world of electronic computation. End of story.

In theory ray tracing and voxels are a nice idea, in practice current GPU hardware offers very little in the way of accelerated processing. And as I think its unlikely we will all be replacing out CPU/GPU combo with pure vector processing boxes anytime soon... I'm not too sure what Carmack is trying to do :)

Ray tracing is brilliant for non real time CGI work, without a doubt FAR better than tesselation. The amount of anomolies even renowned techniques such as marching cubes introduce into even the finest of meshes always staggers me... However I think if Carmack REALLY wants to get involed he needs to embrace the current hardware trend and work with triangles like everyone else :\

Personally i think pixel splatting is an underuses technique which has great promise.. but you never see any of the engine dev's touching on it..
 
That article has nothing to do with John Carmack, they obviously thought name dropping him plus quoting some obscure interview where he happened to mention voxels would add some kind of credibility to the nonsense they knew was about to be spewed out.
 
Aye just re-read it properly (I only skim read before, shouldnt do that really id im going to comment!)

The whole voxel thing for real time engines just seems too be dragged up every few years by a dev to try and differentiate themsevles from everyone else. Its really quite simple, theres a reason it never took off for that kind of application and that is its easier to parallelise and thus speed up more basic triangular vertex processing...

Its a bit of a moot article if we're being honest, nothing much will come of it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom