Final Fantasy At 2.5FPS

Rikardon writes: "Adding a little fuel to the ATi-vs-NVIDIA fire started earlier today on Slashdot, NVIDIA and Square are showing a demo at SIGGRAPH of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within being rendered in 'real time' (four-tenths of a second per frame) on a Quadro-based workstation. Now that I think of it, this should also inject new life into this debate." Defender2000 points to the Yahoo article. Update: 08/14 09:30 PM by T : Original headline was wrong, said ".4FPS" but as cxreg pointed out, .4 frame per second isn't .4 seconds per frame. Sorry.

Re:oh my bad memory and deleted old stories

No, he was absolutly correct. Toy story is not close to being rendered in real time yet and this isn't the same. There are many details to the REYES architecture that is used in PRman and likewise used to render toy story. One is the subdivision of NURBS patches and subdivision surfaces to the pixel level. Another is the surface, light, and volume shaders used. There are many many things that people are missing when they say 'Movie X rendered in real time'. What they really mean is 'Movie X rendered in near realtime, at a MUCH lower resolution, with a bajillion hacks to make it look as close as possible to the original.'

So what?

So what if it can render fast?... That still doesn't mean things like that can be MADE fast!...The ungodly massive number of man-hours that went into:

• Modelling
• Matte painting
• Painting textures
• Lighting
• Shading
• Animating
• Writing!
• Making the sound effects
• Making the music
• Doing the voice work & lip-sync'ing
• Writing custom graphics applications for the skin, hair, etc.
• Using said applications in the afformentioned modelling/animating/texturing, etc.

So, yippee, it can render fast...too bad that has NO BEARING on the actual quality of the production (with the possible exception of the team gets to iterate on the work a little more).

Re:So what?

After seeing the movie, I don't believe that more than 30 minutes was spent on the writing process.

But the big question is

will this improve the plot?

Rendering in real-time won't happen...

``It has long been an artist's dream to render CG animation in real-time,'' stated Kazuyuki Hashimoto, CTO at Square USA.

We've been able to render CG animation in real time since Ivan Sutherland was a grad student. What makes it hard is a classic Parkinson's law: your needs expand to fill existing processor power. When the movie companies and animation houses have more horsepower, they will go to the next level and push the state of the art in CG back from what's capable of being done in real-time.

The FF render times sound about the same as numbers I heard from Pixar about Toy Story. What was that post a couple weeks ago, about the machine you want always costing $5000? Well, the frame you want to render will always take 90 minutes.

Finally some screenshots

Can be found at http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=final_fantasy [nvidia.com]

The article (on yahoo) is pretty exagerated and sensationalistic, but the images are still very impressive, even they are about what you would expect at 2.5 FPS with such a powerful card. I think it is a pretty good indication of what the next generation of console games (after gamecube and x-box) will look like.

It doesn't look as good as the movie

While it is impressive to see the movie rendered in real-time (with adjustable lighting sources and shadows and reflections) it really doesn't look as good as the movie did. I'm at siggraph now (just saw the demo five minutes ago) and the interactive polygon rendering techniques just can't match the radiosity/raytracing used for professional moves - its getting close though!

Lets see...

60 frames per second divided by .4 (frames per second) = 150. If we oversimplify and apply Moore's law to the speed of 3D processors, we will halve this every 18 months.

As I see it, we are about 7 - 8 years away from this kind of rendering in real time.

Thoughts? Comments? Complaints?

A few factors to consider ...

It sure sounds nice when they write that they can render something that took 90 mins per frame at .4 seconds per frame, but is this really a fair comparison? I don't doubt that NVIDIA is bringing some wicked technologies to the table, but let's also consider:

1. Size of rendered frames. What resolution was NVIDIA rendering out, maybe 640x480? 1024x768? FF was probably rendered out at 1880x1024 (about 2-3 times the number of pixels as compared to 1024x768) if not more.
2. How did they have to massage the data before passing it to the rendering pipeline? I hear FF was rendered with Renderman ... are they claiming they can render RIB files through the Quadra chipset? If not, how much time does it take to convert/cook the data? If so, then ... wow
3. How good did it look in the end? Were all the elements rendered properly, and does it really look anywhere near as good as the movie we saw in the theatre?

Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see this kind of technology coming, I can totally see this replacing, or at least complementing, our Linux render farm at some point in the future. But it sure would be nice if we had some usefull technical details to qualify this 90 mins verses .4 seconds render time comparison.

--M

"Quadro" vs. "GeForce"

If the "Quadro" can do it, so can a GeForce 3.

As I pointed out previously [slashdot.org], NVidia's "Quadro" and "GeForce" lines are actually the same hardware. GeForce 2 boards can be "converted" to Quadro 2 boards with a jumper. [geocities.com]

The GeForce 3 and "Quadro DCC" boards both use the NVidia NV20 chip, have the same driver, and appear to be very similar if not identical. It's hard to find differences in the feature set. Only ELSA (which is basically a unit of NVidia) sells the Quadro DCC, and apparently only through 3DS Max dealers, along with a special 3DS MAX driver. It's more of a private label than a real product line at this point.

Apples to Oranges?

Notice how the official "press release" doesn't state the resolution it was rendered at? What's the movie resolution? Several thousand by Several thousand I imagine. Does doing it a 640x480 or LOWER mean the same thing? I have a hard time believing that a Quadro Setup can render something in .4 of a sec that their SGI setup takes 90mins to do. If Nvidia WAS INDEED 100,000 times faster at this using a Quadro setup, we might have heard of this before? Something's missing from this methinks.

Re:Apples to Oranges?

From http://movieweb.com/movie/toystory/toystory.txt [movieweb.com]

"RESOLUTION:The resolution of a digital image refers to the number of pixels stored. For "Toy Story," the resolution is typically 1536 x 922 pixels."

Marko No. 5

Have you seen the Zoltar demo?

If you have a Geforce3, go find the Zoltar demo. It's on the web if you look hard enough. Something like 220 megabytes worth of crap, and all it does is model and animate a human head. But HOLY SHIT does it look incredible! Also, find the Chameleon demo. Again, Google is your friend.