I call bullshit too.
Someone above said that you obviously can’t store unlimited points in a computer. No, no you cannot.
He suggested that the points were somehow stored in equations. Well, uhm, yes, how exactly?
Because that’s how polygons work. Equations and vectors signify surfaces, that the rasterizer can then populate with pixels by using textures.
I spent the past hour thinking about this. Let’s say we don’t want unlimited points in a scene. Let’s say, we want a billion. A billion points. And no, you can’t say you want these points to be generated by equations, because you used a _fucking laserscanner_ as he suggests in another video. How are you going to compress that? You’re not. You can’t. The best you can possibly do is to map your points straight to memory addresses, and then have each point defined in relation to a neighbor, which must be the previous point; even if you could do this, that’s _still_ 4-6 bits per point, depending on how clever you are.
Notice, that’s not even storing the colour with the point (this could, arguably, be done by using a texture, weird as that may sound, so that’s no different than normal, but it does count against the infinite detail idea)
So nomatter how you look at it, to get a billion unique points, you need at least 500 megabytes worth of storage in ram. And the storage algorithm I outlined above? it would be very hard to code a search algorithm for.
At the very most, with modern day computers, the upper limit would be 4 billion points. Not unlimited. Well…….
Supposing you mounted one of them SSD’s that cost 5000+$ on your pci express bus, I suppose you’d have the bandwidth to swap in points fast enough that there’s a theoretical upper bound for a pc maybe 1000 times higher. Presuming they wrote a magical logarithmic search function for what’s an otherwise linear data structure, which is what they clain to have done.
But a trillion points is mentioned in the video, and he goes on to say that this stuff has unlimited detail. That’s plainly nonsense. nomatter what or how you do this, they have not written something that supercedes previous experiments run on supercomputers.
And from the looks of the video, they don’t actually render unique points; they render the same points, but from different angles. That’s not unlimited detail, that’s unlimited sameness, and I can do that too. It’s called a for-loop, and it’s how they did the pyramid monkey thingies.
This is not a breakthrough, this is a small time company with a small time owner looking to make a quick buck by being sold to a major player.
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