Unlimited Detail

Unlimited Detail Wants To Kill 3D Cards | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Watch this video to see what is the end of graphic cards, say goodbye to nvidia and ATI. No more needing to update your hardware to run the latest game. AMEN!Hasta la vista to all claims of super enhanced graphics being done better. This is the indutry killer/evolver! If this proves true and we can get some artist and animators to show its true potential...then Its over like disco! Goodnight polygons and slow frame rates! Hello awesomeness! Hopefully we can make some money on the known companies to suffer the impact on theirstocksand gain on theaspect that they will belosing money. Tell me what you guys think? Killer or vanilla?

I can finally save my money for games instead of upgrading my hardware every 2 minutes! That puts everyone on the same playing field which means the only limit is how creative developers are!

A search algorithim? Oh meh gawd, I dunt want to imagine their fancy smancy recursive algorithim. I don't know if this will work, but if it does :o

EDIT: Read some of the comments, something sounds fishy.

Sounds fake to me

So is this another go at making raytracing and voxels take over polygon use? It would be great if this would happen, we haven't ahd a major jump in graphical tech since the consimer market craved 3dfx and voodoo cards. I mean sure some very cool enhancements have been made to this tech, but it's still pretty much doing the same thing.

IF this turns out to be true then this is going to be a sweet shift in the coming years....but I'm with Jiggly on this, something is going on here if you start reading some of the comments in the vid.

Woah Woah wait a sec, I just realized something. They keep talking about their advanced search algorithm that is used to pre-locate what is going to be displayed on the screen....but they don't talk about animating their models at all.

Take a look at this from their site

"Unlimited Detail is a fourth system, which is more like a search algorithm than a 3D engine. It is best explained like this:if you had a word document and you went to the "SEARCH" tool and typed in a word like "MONEY" the search tool quickly searches for every place that word appeared in the document. Google and Yahoo are also search engines that go looking for things very quickly. Unlimited Detail is basically a point cloud search algorithm. We can build enormous worlds with huge numbers of points, then compress them down to be very small. The Unlimited Detail engine works out which direction the camera is facing and then searches the data to find only the points it needs to put on the screen it doesn't touch any unneeded points, all it wants is 1024*768 (if that is our resolution) points, one for each pixel of the screen. It has a few tricky things to work out, like: what objects are closest to the camera, what objects cover each other, how big should an object be as it gets further back. But all of this is done by a new sort of method that we call MASS CONNECTED PROCESSING. Mass connected processing is where we have a way of processing masses of data at the same time and then applying the small changes to each part at the end.

The result is a perfect pure bug free 3D engine that gives Unlimited Geometry running super fast, and it's all done in software."

I can see this system working for pre-rendered areas that include objects and beckgrounds, but what about animated 3d models? Did anyone else notice that there was no animation for any of their stuff?? What I think we are looking at are advanced prerendering for environments and that's it. Would it bee cool to integrate this onto modern games to ease the burden on the number of polys on the screen at once? Yeah that would be cool to have a hybrid game running both of these systems....but only with things that have no interaction.

If i am reading this the wrong way someone please let me know, i'd like to be proved wrong on this tech lol

Personally I think this is the future. With CPUs getting more and more cores and power they can do alot more. And eventually we will move possibly to the CPU generating the Graphics like they did before the GPU. This is the future. Of course this is like 10 to like 30 years from now. But think of the possibilities. This article and vid is probably either fake or it died awhile ago. That is if we dont just do away with Home hardware and just use the cloud. I really am interested how IT will progress in the coming years its just not something you can predict very well besides the point that tech will get better. You never know what the kids of today will invent tomorrow.KLONE360

Yeah but GPUs are sooo much more powerful than CPUs, they have been this way for a long time. Take a look at this here

http://www.kaspersky.com/news?id=207575979

They are using an NVIDIA GPU in place of a cpu for doing the work. Kaperski antivirus performed 360times faster using the GPU rather than a Core2Duo at 2.6ghz.

Quote from the article

"Unlimited Detail is basically a point cloud search algorithm"

Can anyone see the magic word in there?? no? Well its cloud. anyone want to search it up? no? Basicly it means server farm. meaning this wont be done on regular PC's for years

also i looked at the video. im sorry. but that looks terrible. crysis looks better than that heap

Saw this on /g/ yesterday. I'm pretty skeptical, but it'd be cool if something eventually came of this.

Can anyone see the magic word in there?? no? Well its cloud. anyone want to search it up? no? Basicly it means server farm. meaning this wont be done on regular PC's for yearshofuldig

Uh, no..it's pretty obvious that by "cloud" they mean the masses of points that make up objects in the world. The guy in that video is referring to them as "point clouds." You're way off with that assumption..

also i looked at the video. im sorry. but that looks terrible. crysis looks better than that heaphofuldig

Keep in mind that the models they showed in their examples are likely made by programmers, not professional artists. I think the point of the video was to show that it "works" in some capacity. Who knows if it'll ever be anything more than that.

I noticed that animationa and dynamic lighting and physicsare missing...But if they integrate this with current graphics technology we could have something pehnominal here. Just imagine, we can use this only for stationary objects, scenery and scale, letting GPUs handle everything else. That would probably be a huge workload taken off the gpu and cpu. Also should knock development time and cost down allowing for greater focus on quality by the quantity!

I noticed that animationa and dynamic lighting and physics is missing...But if they integrate this with current gaphics technology we could have something pehnominal her. Just imagine, we can use this only for stationary objects and scenery and let GPUs handle everything else. That would probably be a huge workload taken off the gpu and cpu. Also should knowck development time and cost down aloowing for greater focus om quality by the quantity!

pbutt77

that's exactly waht I was saying earlier. If this is true it could be nice to merge the two techs together to get more performance everywhere.

I knowsearch algorithms are very powerful. There's even asearch algorithm which has been made which can scan the internet for phrases/words, which are used often - and predict future events with quite a lot of success and accuracy. But somehow this unlimited detail sounds too good to be true. How can asearch algorithm do all this work, and put animations together, shading and everything else. Including textures and all the rest of it.

I knowsearch algorithms are very powerful. There's even asearch algorithm which has been made which can scan the internet for phrases/words, which are used often - and predict future events with quite a lot of success and accuracy. But somehow this unlimited detail sounds too good to be true. How can asearch algorithm do all this work, and put animations together, shading and everything else. Including textures and all the rest of it.

Solar-X

If they build it...we will come!

I noticed that animationa and dynamic lighting and physicsare missing...But if they integrate this with current graphics technology we could have something pehnominal here. Just imagine, we can use this only for stationary objects, scenery and scale, letting GPUs handle everything else. That would probably be a huge workload taken off the gpu and cpu. Also should knock development time and cost down allowing for greater focus on quality by the quantity!

pbutt77

Thsi has already been done in the past with games like Delta Force, Comanche and Oucast. The landscaped is rendered that way while the dynamic objects like the player models are made of standard polygons. The scenery is entirely static and ugly up close. The interaction between the landscape and the polygon-based objects is limited. The objects are like floating on top of it. Video cards are far from dead.

The problem is still that the computer would implode when it calculates how the "creatures" move or how the wind make the grass move... It works great on stationary things but we still have many years to go =(