OT : Lock on on PS3 ? (!)

[Trident]

I have no doubt that the PC will catch up with this kind of performance rather quickly. I do have my doubts as to the practical feasibility of game-graphics as displayed in these tech-demos, however. Think about it, if we just take a hypothetical successor to LOMAC as an example there is unfortunately little chance of seeing a large theatre with that kind of detail in the terrain mesh. The reason isn't so much a lack of performance but a lack of development-resources and data - the geometry in that demonstration was derived from LADAR, how much of the earth's surface do you think is covered in that kind of presicion, and how much is the data likely to cost? Not practical for a flight sim, I think, especially given the shoe-string budgets such niche-projects have to make do with today.

 

On a lesser scale the same applies to any other type of game, with the environments becoming potentially so detailed there simply is a time-bottleneck in the creation of all the content that goes in there. Those demos were all very limited in size, so it was of course possible to pull off all those neat tricks. I don't expect to see them (on the same scale atleast) in actual game titles any time soon.

[DayGlow]

At the same time hopefully as the tech progresses new ways of rendering terrain will come about. Instead of complex meshes with high rez texture maps, a simpler mesh that takes advantage of normal mapping and procedural texture mapping and shaders to give detail. If it works on smaller environments, hopefully it will work on larger ones as well.

[Trident]

Still, you somehow need to get your hands on the elevation data to feed your renderer first and more importantly find out if it actually exists for the area in question.

 

Anyway, the 19m res meshes for FS2002/2004 are already extremely impressive IMHO and probably much more readily available. From a geometry POV that Switzerland add-on really isn't too far behind the PS3 demo at all, combined with ED's excellent texturing and haze it would really be competitive.

[zorlac]

From what I have read in a next gen console preview newspaper article the PS3 will have a 3.2 Ghz CPU and a 550MB 3D graphics card.

 

I believe the PS3 will have 512Mb RAM, but its split into two chunks. 256Mb of XDR memory running at 3.2GHZ (!!!), and another 256Mb for video RAM, clocked at ...err... something else (700MHz?).

[oxking]

Nope, undersand the statemant in the video file so, that the RAM is shared....

The graphic processor can acces every point in the RAM.

Maybe its an quite dynamic way of shared memory,

and not like on current PCs, where from 768MB are 128MB only for Graphics

and 512MB are dedicated to system.

[Roman G]

Still, you somehow need to get your hands on the elevation data to feed your renderer first and more importantly find out if it actually exists for the area in question.

 

No, you actually don't have to. You can generate the data using noise functions (such as Perlin noise) and unless you live in the area you won't be able to tell whether you see real terrain data or not. This is what (IMHO rather unsuccesfull and very buggy) SOLDNER game is doing. They are using real data for area about 2000 x 3000 kilometers area in about 1 x 1 km resolution. To get more detail they generate the "in bettween" data by noise functions - and the result is IMHO very good. LOCKON also use noise functions (as far I remember for terrain textures, clouds and perhaps smoke). If you saw any CGI holywood movie, they all use parametrized noise to generate data. Otherwise it would take about forever to manually create all the data seen in movies like Finding Nemo. The "inventor" of noise function usage - Perlin - actually got Oscar for this his contribution to Holywood special effects.

 

Those interested in more info can take a look here:

 

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/

http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/m_perlin.htm

 

DayGlow, you are right, the procedural textures (most of them use noise functions), can reduce texture size more than thousandfold. The problem is that - as far I remember correctly NVIDIA GPU programming articles from less than year ago - they are still very slow for using in real-time. They way how they are mostly used today for real-time apps is that the procedural textures are pre-calculated usually when the application loads - instead of loading texture from JPEG file the texture is "calculated". The problem with this way is that you lose the memory size advantage - once the texture is "calculated" it occupies the same size in memory as if it was loaded from a JPEG file. I don't remember direct hardware support for noise functions advertised in Cell (if It was there I am sure they would tell about it), so I presume - while the Cell might be faster in calculating procedural textures in real time - it is probably still slow. The other things you talked about - the normal maps, light maps and so on - they are in fact additional textures - while they improve model look and require fewer polygons/triangles for rendering - they are still just additional textures (of different kind) - you need "original" texture PLUS normal map/light map/specular map & reflection/environment map to render your model. But yes - with normal map your model might require far less triangles. This is what FarCry & Doom are using ...

 

One more link: info about PS3 on Wiki:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3