Unlimited Detail Technology

[xenocide]

Oh and notice how after all this incredibly lengthy development time, it's still just out of reach? Another classic hallmark of a scam.

I remember seeing it the first time around and wondering how it would be that some small startup was able to create such fanciful technology, and they just randomly appeared at a big tradeshow. If you just apply the "It's a Scam" mindset to everything about this, it makes a lot more sense lol.

 

[qubit]

I remember seeing it the first time around and wondering how it would be that some small startup was able to create such fanciful technology, and they just randomly appeared at a big tradeshow. If you just apply the "It's a Scam" mindset to everything about this, it makes a lot more sense lol.

Yeah, doesn't it, just! This is a big thread to read through, but if you search for my posts, I explain in several places the various ways that this is obviously a scam. The whole lot hinges on this ridiculous "unlimited" claim.

To find the posts, click the Games link above this thread and then find the thread in the section. Then click on the number of posts next to it. You'll see a list of all the posters for that thread. Click on my username and you'll see all my posts listed.

Heck, here's the link: http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/search.php?searchid=14560357

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

And one unconvincing video later...

Myself and a few others have already debunked this in this thread. The whole root of the problem is the way they're shouting "unlimited" all over the place. Unlimited = infinity and for that you need infinite power, infiinite data, infinite electrical power etc etc. An absolute impossibility.

Notice how after a whole further year of development, they can only show one cheesy low res 480p video with a dodgy sounding narrator and grandiose music? Sounds like one big pisstake, don't it?

This is bullshit: they'll never release it. It's just a ploy to con more investment money. Remember this, I said it here.

EDIT: All the effects shown here can be done now with tesselation in DX11. Just run the Unigine benchmark if you don't believe me.

Its available in 1080p now.

 

[qubit]

Its available in 1080p now.

Link?

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

 

[douglatins]

This is getting to long to get implemented, imagine skyrim with that. It would be a mindfacking

 

[AphexDreamer]

This is getting to long to get implemented, imagine skyrim with that. It would be a mindfacking

Skyrim will be mindfacking no matter what.

 

[qubit]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

I noticed the following:

- the UD rendered island doesn't appear to be in 1080p resolution. Try pausing the video to see what I mean
- There's an odd lack of contrast to it, a bit like you might get looking through light fog. I would expect it to look pin sharp. Fudging it can be good at hiding fakery, such as low res rendering
- If they're rendering down to a grain of sand, then why didn't they zoom in to show this?

 

[RejZoR]

Why does everything they show look static and like everything is using geometry instancing for everything? Just looks cheap and fake. All palm trees despite "unlimited" detail look the same. All the grass looks the same. All the rocks look the same. All the architecture looks identical. And i mean like an exact copy identical.

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

because thats exactly what there doing to get 20fps in software rendering mode lolz, its just geometry instancing to safe on resources, etc, still the same old shit nothings changed.

 

[qubit]

Why does everything they show look static and like everything is using geometry instancing for everything? Just looks cheap and fake. All palm trees despite "unlimited" detail look the same. All the grass looks the same. All the rocks look the same. All the architecture looks identical. And i mean like an exact copy identical.

Yes, funny that. It all looks so samey and odd.

 

[Benetanegia]

They depend on stancing because every distinct model requires several dozen MB of storage. This is and has always been the biggest drawback to voxel rendering. You might be able to "find" the correct voxel in an blink, and you might only need find 1920x1080 voxels to make the picture, but the billions of voxels required to represent a voxel made scene decently still have to be stored somewhere.

So... they cheat. They put the same models over and over and generate some things procedurally, which is not a bad thing to do on it's own, but is not related with their tech at all and it's just bypassing the real problem with voxel rendering. Using procedural methods, you could generate the same detail and randomness with polys, and definately when applying tesselation. What you can't do that way is to create the complex, unique snd varied scenery that we are used to see in modern games.

Quite literally everyone in the gaming industry is researching/has researched voxel rendering and literally all who did have abandoned it or delayed it to 2016 ++. Unlimited Detail is just a hoax or a scam. They are doing voxel rendering and doing it pretty fast according to them... well I'm not even going to try and refute that claim, there's over 50 other voxel renderers out there capable of similar performance (though most use the GPU), already with proper real time demos and proper papers and also patents. None of which UD has shown. It doesn't matter, none of the others are suitable for real time today and neither is UD.

 

[crazyeyesreaper]

what he said ^

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

Couldn't you just do a procedural world generation like minecraft, just much much more advanced? Have any manual changes you make to that generated world just alter the original "seed" so you never increase the file size.

 

[xenocide]

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/j66px/unlimited_detail_circa_2003_not_much_has_changed/

Related.

 

[RejZoR]

Eventually, at some point, we will have graphics objects made out of atom like elements (imagine Minecraft with super tiny blocks instead of huge cubes). But this won't happen in 10 or 20 years. It might in 50 years time or more however. Polygons will remain the prefered technique for 3D games. And that's the end of it. There will be new shading techniques and new improvements to the rendering itself but this won't really change.

 

[TIGR]

Eventually, at some point, we will have graphics objects made out of atom like elements (imagine Minecraft with super tiny blocks instead of huge cubes). But this won't happen in 10 or 20 years. It might in 50 years time or more however. Polygons will remain the prefered technique for 3D games. And that's the end of it. There will be new shading techniques and new improvements to the rendering itself but this won't really change.

Would you be willing to share your take on this? Does that change what you anticipate occurring in the next twenty years at all? Maybe you were already familiar with it and the work of Kurzweil, etc.

 

[hellrazor]

Eventually, at some point, we will have graphics objects made out of atom like elements (imagine Minecraft with super tiny blocks instead of huge cubes). But this won't happen in 10 or 20 years. It might in 50 years time or more however. Polygons will remain the prefered technique for 3D games. And that's the end of it. There will be new shading techniques and new improvements to the rendering itself but this won't really change.

It seems you are simply deluded about how fast computers change.

 

[Benetanegia]

It seems you are simply deluded about how fast computers change.

Oh no, for static scenery (and disregarding the storage problem) it will be doable in 5 years easily. Don't let the state of current voxel rendering confuse you. The good thing about voxel rendering, specifically sparse voxel octree implementations is that the gains are exponential, because they do not work with cartessian coordinates, data is stored hierarchically. For every of the 3 dimensions, it's 2^n where n is the iteration factor, which depends on the available performance. So if we assume current hardware has a performance factor of 10 (kinda arbitrarily chosen number*) and future generations have a factor twice as high (that is 20, because CPU, GPU, memory BW are twice as fast) we would be talking about massively higher details posible:

2^10 = 1024 posible voxels/"atoms"/dots per dimension. i.e if voxels represent 1 mm in real life we could only represent a scene of just 1 m^3.

2^20 = 1048576 voxel -> 1 km^3 more than you probably need to be seen at any given time

*Realistically most of the voxel implementations nowadays are capable of 12 to 14 iterations at relatively low resolutions, so that means that at 1mm wide voxels, they can represent scenes that are 16 m wide in every dimension. Of course they use voxels that are bigger than that so they represent accordingly bigger albeit less "detailed" scenes.

So technically and performance wise they can do something interesting now and in just a few generations they will be able to do 1000 times more in that regards. The problem of storage still persists though and the technology able to store the required TeraBytes of information that would be required to store a game world (even with current detail) does not exist yet. Holographic disks, hmm maybe.

Summarizing, when it comes to the rendering side of things, very small voxels will be posible very soon, but storing all that info is imposible, so it doesn't really matter if such a detail can be represented on a display or not, because we will not be able to create and store such a detailed world. Current methods are creating the world with polys and then convert them to voxels which is completely redundant and stupid now that we have tesselation and thus smaller-than-pixel triangles are posible or will be posible in just 1 generation. And triangles are easy to animate while voxels are a nightmare.

 

[remixedcat]

Crysis 6 system requirements:
12.4Ghz AMD Infinion x82 82 core processor or Intel i24
5TB RAM
4PB SSD
Nvidia Geforce X2X980GTX2 with 1TB DDR10 memory or AMD Radeon 26980
Microsoft GXP Operating system Service pack 8

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

Crysis 6 system requirements:
12.4Ghz AMD Infinion x82 82 core processor or Intel i24
5TB RAM
4PB SSD
Nvidia Geforce X2X980GTX2 with 1TB DDR10 memory or AMD Radeon 26980
Microsoft GXP Operating system Service pack 8

Pffft. Like we'd ever get a service pack 8.

 

[bpgt64]

I'll give a fly squirrel frack when it shows up in a game. Until then, it does me nothing and it reeks of scam.

 

[remixedcat]

I threw that SP8 in there for its and shiggles

 

[hellrazor]

By that time (AKA never) Linux will be the dominant desktop OS and we won't have service packs.

 

[Benetanegia]

lol it depends. Maybe Microsoft gets infected with the Google virus and starts calling each minor update a new SP version...