Reality Check: 3D Graphics Take On Hollywood
Table of contents
- 1. Using Nature As The Template
- 2. Game Evolution
- 3. Lighting And Dazzle Effects
- 4. Light 2.0
- 5. Shadows
- 6. Evolution Of Characters
Gamers usually see a marked improvement in 3D graphics every two or three years. When Microsoft ties a new version of DirectX into Windows, or when AMD/Nvidia announce an exciting new feature in their graphics chips (one that developers are excited about, that is), you can look forward to new effects coming along for the ride.
Milestone titles like Morrowind, Doom 3, and Far Cry were made famous by reflections in the water, nerve-wracking lighting effects, and believable island worlds. The greatest improvement was the development of the pixel shader, which now ensures natural water movements, lighting effects on surfaces, and film-style special effects like motion blur. Today, the most advanced effects are enabled by DirectX 10.1 and Shader 4; DirectX 11 and Shader Model 5 have already been announced and will pave the way for another level of added realism.
High Dynamic Range Rendering (HDR-R) is responsible for bright shining effects, artificial 3D light sources creating true reflections on surfaces, and the disorientation of staring straight at the sun. Users with a graphics card using Shader Model 3 were astounded by the shimmering silver swords and sunlit temples of white stone blocks in Oblivion. Today, HDR-R with DirectX 10 generates long rays of light as seen in Crysis or Stalker: Clear Sky, breaking through the branches and leaves and creating wonderful shadow play.
Hollywood has been making use of this potential for much longer, often employing special cameras that better capture the intensity of the light in order to get closer to the receptivity of the brain and eyes. The following pages will portray many optical comparisons between 3D graphics, and nature’s own special effects, all of which will help to impressively demonstrate the development and current state of PC games.
This article is made up of two parts. The first discusses the development of games and characters, and gives an overview of current lighting effects and the depth effect of surfaces. The second section concentrates more on the elements of fire and water, draws comparisons with Hollywood monsters and special effects, adds a little physics, and a couple of images foretelling the next generation.
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we need power!
...to create these environments.
roll on 8-core mobo's with SSD raid's built in..!
cheers,
bill
p.s. stuff and nonsense: http://www.eupeople.net/forum
Funny how people slam Source as an "obsolete game engine" but you look at that comparison and HL2 still looks better than the entire bottom row.
Page 1 of this article causes 1 of the cores on my CPU to max out, tried IE and firefox, other pages are fine
Seems to be the GCHQ ad that doess it for me.
FF + Adblock Plus extension = Add killer!!
My Firefox process is at near 0% utilisation (and I only have 2x single core Opterons @ 2.2Ghz).
Bob
@bobwya But then how would we know where to join the thought police!?
Hmm, if you are going to use screenshots, settings the gamma, contrast and brightness levels better would help, those crysis shots for one are far too washed out. I've got my own so it is very dark at night and daytime is far deeper and vibrant than those shots.
firefox + noscript + adblock = means no crashes her and the only thing that runs is the stuff i want to run.
We have the technology and power to do all this already, but it jsut can't be done in an affordable way for the consumer. I think intel had an 8 core system with 3-4 graphics cards and raided rapters. That kinda system would probably blitz some of the power required here, but who can afford it? Oh yeah and I'm sure moores law comes in here cos nvidia and ATI could probably double or triple their card power easily but can't because of laws, policies, costs etc...
We have the technology and power to do all this already, but it jsut can't be done in an affordable way for the consumer. I think intel had an 8 core system with 3-4 graphics cards and raided rapters. That kinda system would probably blitz some of the power required here, but who can afford it? Oh yeah and I'm sure moores law comes in here cos nvidia and ATI could probably double or triple their card power easily but can't because of laws, policies, costs etc...
I think that Intel system ray tracing system was a Core i7 with SSD's - right?
Nvidia can't double their card power easily. The 280 is at the limit of the die cutter/packaging technology they are using. They can't easily make a 280X2 because of the power consumption and of course market forces (competition from ATI is strong just now). A bigger die means more power consumption and more importantly lower yields (hence higher costs).
These restrictions lead to SLI and Crossfire as measures to improve performance. Of course this raises the power consumption of the whole system but spreads out the power requirements and heat generating components in a more manageable way.
Tech companies ride following the bleeding edge of Silicon processing technology as transistor (feature) size are decreased year on year. This allows more transistors to packed into the same area which benefits GPU performance allowing greater parallelism of tasks.
Bob
Neither Mass Effect or Rainbow Six Vegas support DX10 despite what this article says. Currently BioShock/Gears of War are the only UT3 engine games to support DirectX10.
Jeez is it just me or is this about the worse game tech article I have ever seen?
Most of the technical explaination is just plain wrong or just chalked up to being accomplished with DX10... /sigh
I can't wait to move over to DX10 and get my HDR renderpath to automagically give me physically correct light-rays...
"Warcraft took the world by storm in 1994. The simple graphics were given a sidelong point of view and fixed, painted on shadows were added to make things look more plastic. The sequel came along in 1995; the graphics were slightly improved, but the greatest change was a higher resolution, which made the pixels more fine. This was a necessary move, particularly for the text. Real 3D graphics hadn’t even been considered yet. They first appeared with the third part of the series in 2002"
3D graphics in RTS appeared 5 years earlier in Chris Taylor's Total Annihilation (TA) in 1997.
http://www.gamereplays.org/portals [...] pt3_1&st=1
Warcraft was certainly no where near a front runner, perhaps the wording of your article should say "Blizzard implemented their first 3D graphics game when they released Warcraft 3 early in 2002"
Does anyone proof read?