Realtime Graphics / Game Engines

SharkyUK · Jul 13, 2014

Jonnio said:
Can't imagine how good games will look in another few years lol. Cramazeballs.

Yeah, the future is looking good technology-wise. Let's just hope the quality of the games are up there, too!

Silent_Scone said:
Some might see this as either candid, or blanket but I honestly believe it when I say their biggest mistake was looking at Crysis sales in 2007, and thinking, lets take MS up on their offer and bring all of this to consoles. They totally trashed what they set out to do without following through in the next games.

Goodness knows, mate. The truth is that the console sales were where it was at a few years ago (and still is largely) but it's certainly a fair point you make. You could also look at Crytek's subscription models, licensing deals, etc. As good as their technology is, it's not quite found the developer penetration is should (or needs). It was always going to be tough. Taking the Unreal Engine for example; it's been around years. I remember helping out on the beta for the Unreal Warfare SDK (a precursor to their current tech) and that was back in 2000/2001. They've been at this game a long time and feature in an awful lot of titles (both released and in development). Interesting times indeed... either for better or worse.

Silent_Scone · Jul 13, 2014

Well I can see why they did it, but in hindsight (wonderful thing) I think they might have taken a different path. I personally felt, or least it felt like Crysis 2 got swamped by other Xbox releases and I'm not sure how many units they shifted. The game just didn't translate well coming from the reasonably large scale of the original game. As you say also the engine hasn't really found any traction on any big sellers, or anything for that matter. Which is surprising really but then I've not used the SDK so I wouldn't be able to comment.

Jonnio · Jul 15, 2014

Silent_Scone said:
The game just didn't translate well coming from the reasonably large scale of the original game.

That definitely put me off, pretty sure I got it when it first came out and just couldn't get into it. Played it through a couple of months ago and really enjoyed it (I think wireless HDMI to the lounge TV and 3D helped a lot!), installed Crysis 3 shortly after but not put much time into that yet.

SharkyUK · Sep 4, 2014

I thought this was quite impressive for a real-time tech demo...

SharkyUK · Jan 29, 2015

GiT · Jan 29, 2015

SharkyUK said:

Jesus H! That's immense.

Cookie · Jan 29, 2015

Insaaaaaaaaaane

Darren S · Jan 30, 2015

Very impressive!

It actually led onto a discussion in the office here. If a simple apartment looks that good now - what about in a generation's time? Could we conceivably have it where ALL soap operas, documentaries and films could be purely green-screened and real actors simply perform on/in a fully computer generated background? No travelling to various locations. No logistical upheavals of props, backdrops (even weather?) to contend with?

Or taking it further - what if the actors themselves were purely computer generated? It's difficult to imagine in 2015 that the likes of Brad Pitt, Charlize Theron, Will Smith, etc could all be purely computer generated and of course, in a computer generated background for a feature film. But what about in 50 years time? We associate with characters already that exist purely in the digital world - from the likes of Nintendo's Mario, through Halo's Master Chief and even Gordon Freeman from Half-Life. Imagine if in the future, these appeared so life-like on screen as to be almost indistinguishable from real humans?

Of course the computational power required (at present) to do anything resembling real-life (and to remain believable) is some way off yet. But it must arrive at some point. And I'm quite sure that Columbia TriStar/Universal/Sony Pictures et al, would much rather pump £20 million into a film where all the work is done in a single design studio - free of catering, location hassles, actors unions, transport, rehearsals and of course, sky-high A-Lister salaries!

SharkyUK · Jan 30, 2015

If you've got a suitably powerful PC you can download and run a standalone version of the Paris Apartment demo from the link on the designer's page:
http://www.benoitdereau.com/unrealparis.html

@Darren S - I had written a reply to your post but accidentally shut down the page. I will try again soon!

GiT · Jan 30, 2015

I'm giving it a go. i7-4770k, ATI 7970, 16gb ram. Lets see.

GiT · Jan 30, 2015

Yip - mine is spot on. Not full HD - but solid and lag-less

SharkyUK · Feb 2, 2015

Darren S said:
It actually led onto a discussion in the office here. If a simple apartment looks that good now - what about in a generation's time? Could we conceivably have it where ALL soap operas, documentaries and films could be purely green-screened and real actors simply perform on/in a fully computer generated background? No travelling to various locations. No logistical upheavals of props, backdrops (even weather?) to contend with?

It's surprising how much green-screening already goes on when you look at modern Hollywood blockbusters. You can't always believe what you are seeing! The same goes fora lot of the high-end episodic content on TV; the visuals on some of the shows are so much better than they used to be. The process of 'embedding' (or mixing) live actors/props and their CG equivalents has come on in leaps and bounds thanks to advances in the simulation/approximation of global illumination and suchlike. In fact, the CGI world has a lot to thank global illumination for, and techniques such as image-based lighting (IBL) which allows for some near-on seamless integration if done carefully and accurately enough. Cheaper versions of these methods are also filtering their way into modern day games (cheaper in terms of performance costs so that they can be run in realtime) and this is why so many games are really starting to look so good these days.

Darren S said:
Or taking it further - what if the actors themselves were purely computer generated? It's difficult to imagine in 2015 that the likes of Brad Pitt, Charlize Theron, Will Smith, etc could all be purely computer generated and of course, in a computer generated background for a feature film. But what about in 50 years time? We associate with characters already that exist purely in the digital world - from the likes of Nintendo's Mario, through Halo's Master Chief and even Gordon Freeman from Half-Life. Imagine if in the future, these appeared so life-like on screen as to be almost indistinguishable from real humans?

Strangely enough I do believe that many celebs / A-listers already have their likenesses catalogued and ready to go in a virtual form. Regardless of whether they appear as themselves, or are realised through their virtual CG equivalent, their contracts tend to dictate that they still get paid silly amounts of money...! Rendering technology is certainly at a point where it can present a near on perfect representation of, say, a human being... but it generally takes more than that to be believable. You can have some of the most beautifully realised CG models ever... but throw them together into a scene and often the results just don't quite work right. Other times, it can look incredible.

Darren S said:
Of course the computational power required (at present) to do anything resembling real-life (and to remain believable) is some way off yet. But it must arrive at some point. And I'm quite sure that Columbia TriStar/Universal/Sony Pictures et al, would much rather pump £20 million into a film where all the work is done in a single design studio - free of catering, location hassles, actors unions, transport, rehearsals and of course, sky-high A-Lister salaries! :tongueout:

Due to the inherent complexities of big-budget films and the resources, time and effort needed to get that film made and produced, I don't think we'll ever see that happen; i.e. whereby a single design studio is able to pretty much wholly make the film. Even if we are talking a 100% computer generated film. Of course it would potentially offer huge savings for many of the reasons you mention, but the sheer enormity of the workload wouldn't suit a single design studio model. From some recent reading / research I was doing it was interesting to read that the Avatar movies have involved tens, if not a couple hundred, design studios and specialists in terms of getting input, outsourcing work, etc. purely to focus on the visual aspects (which obviously play a huge part in those movies!)

Darren S · Feb 3, 2015

SharkyUK said:
Due to the inherent complexities of big-budget films and the resources, time and effort needed to get that film made and produced, I don't think we'll ever see that happen; i.e. whereby a single design studio is able to pretty much wholly make the film. Even if we are talking a 100% computer generated film. Of course it would potentially offer huge savings for many of the reasons you mention, but the sheer enormity of the workload wouldn't suit a single design studio model. From some recent reading / research I was doing it was interesting to read that the Avatar movies have involved tens, if not a couple hundred, design studios and specialists in terms of getting input, outsourcing work, etc. purely to focus on the visual aspects (which obviously play a huge part in those movies!)

Good stuff Andy!
I guess like you say, to be truly believable - the resources required would be vast and very expensive - probably nothing like the single studio I mentioned earlier!
If they did get to the stage of a purely generated actor in a believable 'world' - I'd guess a whole stream of potential issues and legality would then exist. If for terms of simplicity, an actor was nothing more than a glorified SDK - who would actually retain ownership of that actor? Who would dictate what films that actor did or did not take part in? Would that actor actually ever age - or would audiences want to see him/her permanently at the age of 30, for example? What would happen if hackorz nabbed the SDK and chucked it into their own unscrupulous (read p**n!) productions?? Lastly, would that actor actually have any form of humanity rights??

sn00p · Feb 13, 2015

And on that subject, has anybody watched the tintin movie? It's a real head f**k because the characters are so life like that it starts playing tricks with your brain. You know its a CGI animation, but your eyes are telling you something different.

SharkyUK · Feb 15, 2015

Hahaha! Yes, Tintin is beautiful to look at (despite being a bit of a head f**k) and still looks great a few years on. I found this a short while back and thought it was pretty cool. It shows some of the lighting and deep compositing techniques used to produce the final render frames.

sn00p · Feb 15, 2015

I watched it on the hospital TV when I was in there and I had to bloody google it in the first couple of minutes to find out if it was CGI. It's so realistic and at the same time the characters have features that aren't, so it really f***s with your head.

Also watched Hugo the other day and that's pretty stunning as well.

SharkyUK · Jun 9, 2015

A bit more about the developing Luminous Engine / Studio from Square Enix...

Cookie · Aug 9, 2015

How about this one @SharkyUK?

SharkyUK · Aug 10, 2015

Cookie said:
How about this one @SharkyUK?

It's good mate - thanks for sharing the vid. I'm really impressed with what the Unreal Engine can do and wish I had some time myself to play with it at the moment.

SharkyUK · May 17, 2016

A bit 'old' now but quite impressive nonetheless (and this video made an appearance in the Battlefront thread).

It uses the Frostbite 3 engine along with a mod to enhance the aesthetics. The Frostbite engine is currently undergoing a fair bit of work and is going to be used for upcoming titles including Mass Effect Andromeda (which I'm particularly looking forward to).

Which brings me on to my next question... has anyone ever lived in Stockholm, Sweden? LOL! This is where the Frostbite rendering engine team are based and I've been invited to interview. They've seen my CV and are asking if I'd be interested in being their new Rendering / Graphics Technical Director to drive, focus and coordinate its development both now and going forwards. I'm quite interested but it's not so simple just upping sticks and moving. I'm not as young as I used to be and I have family to consider (no more being selfish). I'm hoping they will largely fund the cost of travel for interview as I wouldn't mind a trip regardless... LOL!

Silent_Scone · May 17, 2016

To answer your question, no I haven't but that sounds like one hell of a role, Andy!
Also that mod is simply a SweetFX overlay. Amazing what you can do with something that simple! Most of the nitty gritty on that engine is locked though I believe.

McGherkin · May 17, 2016

They make super awesome cars. HTH.

mace¬ · May 17, 2016

I haven't been for over a decade but what I remember is no real cider and it was expensive. Very expensive.

SharkyUK · May 17, 2016

Silent_Scone said:
To answer your question, no I haven't but that sounds like one hell of a role, Andy!
Also that mod is simply a SweetFX overlay. Amazing what you can do with something that simple! Most of the nitty gritty on that engine is locked though I believe.

Yeah, it's a very locked down system generally. Although I do believe they are looking at opening it up more... maybe to make for easier mod development or easier licensing in the future. Maybe. Speculation. LOL! Or perhaps that is something that might happen in Frostbite 4.

McDriftin said:
They make super awesome cars. HTH.

That helps massively mate, cheers!

LOL!

mace¬ said:
I haven't been for over a decade but what I remember is no real cider and it was expensive. Very expensive.

I've heard a few comments now on the price / cost of living there. It does appear to be expensive.

SharkyUK · Jul 28, 2016

I love this technology shizzle...

SharkyUK · Nov 4, 2016

I decided to login to my nVidia developer account earlier and see what's going on in the world of real-time stuff... I didn't get far because I started playing with the latest version of their Flex physics engine. Being a sad b**tard I put a little video together along with a suitably s**t soundtrack (it was free).

McGherkin · Nov 4, 2016

That looks really good, particularly the tank of water. I'll have to have a play with that.

SharkyUK · Nov 11, 2016

Having a play with Unreal Engine 4's tech demonstrators... I'm not sure why the last section (Boy and his Kite) has suddenly shrunk a little in size as I recorded it exactly like the segments before it! Oh well...

Daz... · Nov 11, 2016

That's some cool stuff right there. Very impressive.

SharkyUK · May 18, 2017

Another Unreal Engine based tech demo... Star Wars Mos Eisley Spaceport. Kinda cool.

Daz... · May 18, 2017

SharkyUK said:
Another Unreal Engine based tech demo... Star Wars Mos Eisley Spaceport. Kinda cool.

Can't play the video on my phone for some reason. Will have to try running the demo on my PC.

SharkyUK · Aug 1, 2017

It's quite impressive what can be done in realtime on a Titan Xp SLI'd system with some high-res [photogrammetric derived] texture and data sets, fancy shaders, programming effort and art direction. Nice.

SharkyUK · Mar 22, 2018

GDC has allowed developers to present some nice tech this year. Unreal Engine 4's digital character workflow (with Andy Serkis) is incredibly impressive. Both characters are being rendered in real time. Uncanny valley territory.

Daz... · Mar 22, 2018

That’s very impressive stuff!

SharkyUK · Mar 22, 2018

A bit more on the new raytracing stuff from nVidia and their RTX / Gameworks...

Daz... · Mar 22, 2018

That was all looking good until the ray traced reflections came into it...that looks amazing!

I’ll no doubt be crying when then start introducing this into games because my 1070 will burn itself even thinking about it.

SharkyUK · Mar 22, 2018

Yep - the 1070 might have to be put into retirement!

SharkyUK · Aug 17, 2018

A new nVidia RTX demo running in real time on their new $10,000 flagship Quadro RTX 8000 GPU (48GB of GDDR6 RAM, nVLink, 4608 CUDA cores, 576 Tensor cores, 10 gigarays per second, 16 teraflops). The world's first raytracing GPU...

SharkyUK · May 13, 2020

A teasing of Unreal Engine 5's new "Nanite" virtualised geometry rendering tech and the "Lumen" global lighting tech.

SharkyUK · Apr 7, 2022

I recently picked up one of my homebrew projects and started to re-work and refactor it (mainly for fun, research and professional reasons). It's basically a real-time renderer that utilises path tracing and has support for both direct and indirect lighting (global illumination). It only runs on nVidia hardware right now as I'm using CUDA and CUDA is nVidia specific. Due to the work involved I probably won't change any time soon and I'm a bit of a Team Green fan and developer anyway so...

For anyone interested, I'm using CUDA, C++, and OpenGL 4.3 - the OpenGL interop is purely used so that I effectively have a canvas and buffers to read/write to/from rather than utilising it for rasterisation. My path tracer isn't using any form of rasterisation or GPU shader programming at all; it simply iterates through each screen pixel and determines which colour it should be by firing billions of rays out into the 3D world and then calculating what that pixel colour should be. Simples.

I was able to improve the performance of the path tracer significantly by following some recent research on GPU path tracing and implementing their findings. Whilst the results were promising it did somewhat increase the complexity of the codebase and I'm still yet to finish/fix some of the features that I'm bringing across into version 2.0 of my path tracer. Some of the problems I'm facing... well... I'm not even sure how or if I can overcome them yet. But that's part of the fun and challenge! I was also desperate to stick some sort of user interface in there so spent a few hours integrating ImGui. It works great! I haven't even begun to consider what I want and need in the UI yet so it's all a bit 'debug' and 'developer' based and parts of it are already out of date due to the changes I'm making. But the main thing is that it proved the UI integration worked and that it worked well - hence ImGui is staying.

Denoising is hugely important in today's rendering tech as we move more and more towards real-time ray-traced / path-traced graphics that align closer to the so-called rendering equation. The problem is that these rendering techniques can produce noisy images and can sometimes require trillions and trillions of calculations before acceptable imagery is produced. The more times a pixel is 'sampled' the better the resulting image appears. However, this can require thousands and thousands of samples and those samples can take a lot of time to calculate. Not good when you are targeting real-time and 30fps/60fps or higher. Hence, denoising allows lower sample counts to be used by intelligently working out what the pixel colour should be. It effectively removes the need to perform thousands of sample calculations when it only needs, say, a few and then makes a best guess from those. Results and research in this area are proving very promising and I'm hoping to integrate some form of denoising directly into my path tracer at some point (either directly in the per-frame updates or as a final on-demand step).

Oh yeah, stepping up from a 2080 Ti to a 3090 also helped improve the performance quite a bit!

Anyways - here are a few images.