tarheel91 said:
HappySqurriel said:
Dr.Grass said:
HappySqurriel said:
From what has been displayed in the HD-Experience demo, the Wii U seems to be able to display graphics at a level where it would be difficult/impossible to create something significantly better without hardware that was an order of magnituded more powerful.
If the rumours are true and the Wii U is using an R700 it should be able to render polygon and texture detail at close to the limits that 1080p can display, and the main difference between the Wii U and systems that come after it will be the lighting and effects. With how far lighting effects have come we're hitting the limits of what can be done under a local-illumination system and we will need to move to a global illumination lighting model to really see a major change; and the successors to the HD consoles would need to more powerful than any system we can currently buy to pull that off and, unless they release in 2015 or later, this would mean that they would be very expensive. |
What on earth does that mean!?
I implore you to go watch Avatar on Blu-Ray on a nice big TV and tell me that anything we've ever seen in real time comes close to that.
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At 1080p there are (roughly) 2 Million pixels per frame, the R700 can probably render between 90 and 180 Million polygons per second with better lighting and texturing (per polygon) as the HD consoles. When you increase polygon output beyond this level most of the polygons you're adding to the scene will be smaller than a pixel and will not contribute to the scene.
By the way, the primary difference between Avatar and what might be possible with hardware similar to the R700 is lighting effects ... Crysis has tons of environmental detail but doesn't come close to resembling pre-rendered movies because its lighting is far less realistic.
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According to a comment on beyond3d (I trust that forum's analysis because of it's reputation), the Zelda demo used global illumination, and apparently the birdy demo uses it too (you can tell based on the way the light hits the bird belly or something). Personally, one of the most important things I picked up on the tech demos is how much more natural the light looks. This is a big thing for me, especially in regards to games that go for a more realistic style.
Also, in regards to the thread, IBM confirmed the Wii U is running a custom version of the Power7 with "lots of embedded ram." AMD confirmed the Wii U is using a custom version of one of their GPUs, and if it's the rumored 4850, then I can confirm it will obliterate the X360/PS3 as I can run pretty much any multi-plat game on my PC maxed out at 1920x1200 without even trying.
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I'm not going to disagree with their claim, but I think that what they're talking about when they say global illumination and what I'm thinking about are (probably) two very different things ...
In 10 years time, when we have 100 times the current processing power, it is possible that we will see games rendered with ray-tracing and radiosity where all of the surfaces in the scene use bidriectional reflectance functions with subsurface scattering; while it would be far from perfect, the quality of images produce from this type of set up would be approaching photo-realism.
In contrast, there are many hybrid and pre-computed methods that are used in realtime applications today that are supposed to eliminate some of the most obvious problems with local illumination.
