Phew, just got through 40 minutes of watching it and listening to that guy's odd voice. :shadedshu and I can now give the critique you've all been waiting for.
Here's some observations I made while watching it:
- Still claims "unlimited detail" without qualifying it. In fact, he said near the start that he'd explain it, but I don't remember seeing one
- One of the original claims were that all this could run on a simple mobile phone. Yet, the hardware demonstrated was a high end gaming laptop with GTX 460 graphics. No mention of having this run on low powered hardware was made. He should have been challenged on this
- Animation “7 years old” and really low res – admitted it looks awful. Heck, Half-Life is 12 years old and looks miles better! Didn’t show later version of the animation, but excused it as not being ready and won’t show something unfinished. The world looks complete so what's so hard about putting together a basic animation to show the interviewer?
- “No polygons”, but there are. Pause the HardOCP video at time index 16:36, where the big green round thing is showing. Look carefully at the edges, especially on the right hand side and you will see some polygons ie straight edges. They’re not very clearly defined, but present nonetheless. His "point cloud" shouldn't show any artefacts like that. The fact the screenshot is taken with a video camera really helps to hide them, huh? This could be damning and needs to be investigated
- Zooming in real close to a palm tree did make the textures look blurry, just like in a conventional game. “Unlimited detail” would retain it’s clarity and reveal more detail as you got closer. This detail clearly had a limit
- Dell Does finally claim that the tech is voxels, but in “unlimited quantities”. Once again, the claim is unqualified. Give me a break
- A leaf on the ground got zoomed in close and looked really detailed, but could it have just been a texture, given the way the tree looked when zoomed in close?
- I noticed how he avoided zooming in real close to anything generally and the couple of times that he did, it looked very much like it was done with polygons.
- Several times he referred to the incredible number of polygons that were on the screen. But I thought you use "atoms" not polygons...?
- Once again, the amount of repetition is phenomenal and not something you expect to see with "unlimited detail"
- Didn’t say how much memory all this takes. This is a critical parameter and not once did the interviewer ask this really obvious question. From what people on this thread have explained, the memory requirement is crippling
- Zoomed out from the elephant until it disappeared. It didn’t change, like you tend to see in modern games. It just got smaller. This is a good point in its favour, but it can be achieved by simple scaling
- Said that it's all running in software, but will use the GPU once the tech is refined. Yeah, maybe, but I wanna see proof. This laptop had a powerful graphics card. Dell claims that it would run just the same on a 1994 graphics, basically anything that can display a picture. Prove it by running it on Intel integrated graphics
- Dell's explanation of tessellation was off, like benetengia said
- The demo was only running at a lowly 1024x768. The laptop looks like it has a native res of 1366x768, so why wasn't the graphics mode changed to use the whole screen? Is it because the whole thing would have run a lot slower and less impressively, perhaps?
- Benetenegia reckons that the interview was staged and I tend to agree. There were cuts in a few places where Dell was starting to get into an explanation and the video was abruptly cut off and jumped to something else. I really wanted to see exactly what this explanation was
- The "unlimited" claim was never explained or qualified. A dead giveaway that he's hiding something. Once again, you can't use infinite anything in this universe
- The interviewer was constantly bowled over and fawning at Dell and seemed afraid to challenge Dell with his own tough questions. He only quoted other people that asked them
- Dell plays Carmack and Notch off against each other, saying that they are claiming opposites, but his argument didn't hold
- Dell's manner didn't come across as terribly sincere and it did feel like he was selling snake oil. This is an impression though, so don't take it as hard and fast
In summary, I still think this is fishy. I want to see some independent and respected third party (not HardOCP) pick apart this technology and verify the claims, if they're ever given the chance.
