From: Nathan H. <na...@ma...> - 2000-09-26 00:17:31
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On Mon, Sep 25, 2000 at 11:26:03AM -0700, Philip Brown wrote: > [ Nathan Hand writes ] > > > I mean if you can produce a card that'll do 1600x1200x32 at > > > 60fps how long is it going to take game creators to create a game with > > > enough detail to slow down the card. Not many of us play games with a 21" > > > monitor that will do 1600x1200. > > > > People said the same thing about 320x200x256 games, and the same thing > > about doom, and the same thing about quake, and now they're saying the > > same thing about quake3. The lesson of this story is... > > The lesson of the story is: there IS a limit of the human eye. Therefore > there IS a limit on this too. Sure, but the limit isn't 60fps. True motion blur involves rendering at 2-300fps and downsampling. Full screen anti-aliasing at 1600x1200 would require rendering at 6400x4800 for a bare minimum 4x4 interpolation. We haven't even begun to use advanced rendering techniques such as (the easiest example to imagine) parallel mirrored surfaces. Techniques like this require rendering the same scene 20-30x. This means 9000fps! And heaven knows what game developers will be doing once 32 bit stencil buffers are common. Can you imagine real-time water? The mind begins to boggle. None of this is possible without cards 100x faster than today. > After all, increasing color from 8-16-32bit stopped at 32bit cause that's > all the eye can see. We *need* 64 bit colour. You need the extra precision to avoid roundoff errors. Games developers are already asking for this feature! Ideally a future card will have 128 bit colour but todays CPUs aren't up to it. > Hopefully, more effort will then go into true 3d object acceleration and > AI. AI is uninteresting to 3D. But today's cards aren't anywhere near where games developers want them to be. They may seem pretty amazing, but the developers have huge wishlists for the future. Don't be concerned about future hardware taxing the imagination of "how can we use all this power". It's not going to be like that. If anything it will be "damn these cards still aren't fast enough". |