The future of 3d gaming and the end of the polygon. Unless the videocardcompanies have their way.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THaam5mwIR8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Sw3dnu8q8

Huzzah! Now we can render things down to the molecular level!





......why?

Point cloud data has been used in industrial simulation software for a while now. Its only a matter of time before it makes its way into gaming.

I'm all for it... if they can make video cards supporting that tech a lot cheaper first. I still remember those days when a GeForce with a lot less power than my AMD Radeon Sapphire 6570 cost over $1000...

That video is practically ancient now, and has been discussed to death. Suffice it to say, the Polygon will be around for quite a while yet, and that point cloud/voxel stuff isn't viable in a proper game at this point.

Anyone remembers Comanche, Delta Force etc.? Same ... and was dead very fast, because no GPU could render it, it all depends on CPU. Maybe this will be better, but we'll see.

It does seem a bit like making a tv with higher resolution than the human eye can perceive.

Indeed; The RAM count alone on a graphics card alone would have to shoot up to $9k+ workstation levels to even attempt voxels. Not to mention how many more transistors you'd need to even do calculations on them.

And besides, Texturing and Polygons can produce realistic images (though getting several of them to run in real time is beyond the reach of the average consumers budget).

Yes point cloud data would be easier on your graphics card than polygons, but the CPU and memory requirements are enormous. He is said he has so many billions of points rendered on the screen at any time. You have to remember every one of those points requires an individual X, Y, and Z coordinate, and needs to be stored on a hard drive, loaded into memory, and processed by a CPU. You're talking many terabytes of data.There aren't any desktop PC's existing right now that could run something like what you see in that video at this point. Those Devs must have access to their own supercomputer.

Well according to the company owner a video card from 1994 could display these graphics and the only requirement would be that the cad can display all the pixels on screen to the screens resolution. It acts more like a search engine ie you can search thousads of computers on the internet with google without your machine having to have very powerful hardware.