Little Australian games company invents technology 100,000 times better

[SvennoJ]

Very interesting. But if you model things yourself or scan things in instead of using procedural data, you'll have to store all that data somewhere. How much memory does this use? How many megabytes in that one rock?

It sounds like a super advanced version of voxel technology. That was used in Outcast and the Comanche series by NovaLogic among others. Polygons won over voxels back then since 3D cards are specialized in rendering polygons while voxel engines ran on the cpu and required a lot of memory.

They better get talking to NVidea and ATI since hardware real time tessellation is already a reality. This can produce the same effects as this technology and is fully compatible with how artists create objects. Most 3D software lets you define objects as polynomials instead if simple polygons. That doesn't only save on the data side, but also lets you divide up the objects in as many polygons as you need.

Anyway which ever technology wins we can look forward to a future without jarring level of detail changes.