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Read November 01, 2008, 02:57:56 AM #0
PL3X

Alternative Render Methods

Rather than having the usual posts of "how do I do this and that?" I thought I'd start a more interesting discussion. Alternative render methods to the more common rasterised and inerpolated graphics we see in real time graphics, for those of you who are unsure what I'm talking about, this refers to almost every game you play in real time using API's such as GL for PSP (based on OpenGL I think?), OpenGL and DirectX. There's plenty talk of these, but not so much of alternatives mainly due to the fact that they require more to produce a frame than rasterised graphics and so aren't supported (easily) in real time.
So, what are the alternatives? Popular upcoming one is Ray Tracing, this can produce excellent images, for those of you who have never seen the results, here's a nice one:



Another method, slightly better looking (radiosity comes almost free with it too) is photon tracing. These methods, including photon mapping are produce some images that are about as close to real simulations of life as we can currently get, but are very slow. This gives way to a discussion on the future of graphics, I'm sure we all know Moore's law, what do you think?
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Read November 01, 2008, 07:11:23 AM #1
yaustar

Re: Alternative Render Methods

At the moment, we are near the verge where we can do photo-realism in realtime given a fast enough computer. (In fact, we do have the power now, it is just stupidly expensive).

In games, we are still doing a lot of cheating just to keep the framerate up. Maybe after another generation of consoles, we might see something.
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Read November 01, 2008, 12:41:06 PM #2
osgeld

Re: Alternative Render Methods

ive been waiting for realtime raytracing to become mainstream for decades now

the problem with it is, by the time computers get fast enough to produce a quality image at a decent framerate poly based rendering has surpassed it in framerate and resolution

anywho if anyone is interested, heres a demo using realtime raytracing back from 2003

http://scene.org/file.php?id=186520

« Last Edit: November 01, 2008, 12:43:58 PM by osgeld »
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Read November 01, 2008, 07:26:47 PM #3
PL3X

Re: Alternative Render Methods

Yes, we can push real time ray tracing, like the Voxel engine, a real time ray trace engine, but its uses 3 or 4 PS3's in order to get 40 - 60 fps, this doesn't yet take into account anything else other than the image and the bare minmums for input, I'm sure adding physics, audio, ai etc would be even more of a challenge, but going by the current rule in graphics of "if it looks right, it is right" it could be a number of years before we are seeing shipped titles with it.
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