Aside from these observations, I'm also pretty curious how long it takes to render an image like this. It seems significantly more realistic than what we typically see in games or animated movies, so my guess would be that it's still not possible to do this in real-time.
That said, I remember seeing this Unreal Engine demo from a couple years ago which was really impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw
The details in the video are extremely realistic and also render very smoothly. This makes me wonder what the current limitations are that prevent games from looking like this — is it the effort required from artists, or the computational power of a typical user's PC, or something else?
micahtyong
@kevintli I really enjoyed watching the demo you linked! One thing that surprised me was that each triangle in the environment was roughly the size of one pixel. So, at any given time, the scene has 20 million drawn triangles. This includes the ability to dynamically adjust these triangles (and the lighting) anytime they zoomed in/out of the scene or panned around the environment. I wonder what type of computation requirements and caching strategies are used to have scenes render like this in, like you said, real-time!
Aside from these observations, I'm also pretty curious how long it takes to render an image like this. It seems significantly more realistic than what we typically see in games or animated movies, so my guess would be that it's still not possible to do this in real-time.
That said, I remember seeing this Unreal Engine demo from a couple years ago which was really impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw
The details in the video are extremely realistic and also render very smoothly. This makes me wonder what the current limitations are that prevent games from looking like this — is it the effort required from artists, or the computational power of a typical user's PC, or something else?
@kevintli I really enjoyed watching the demo you linked! One thing that surprised me was that each triangle in the environment was roughly the size of one pixel. So, at any given time, the scene has 20 million drawn triangles. This includes the ability to dynamically adjust these triangles (and the lighting) anytime they zoomed in/out of the scene or panned around the environment. I wonder what type of computation requirements and caching strategies are used to have scenes render like this in, like you said, real-time!