Vertigo-X said:
I can understand physics calculations and things of the like being complicated to think of, but it's my impression that they render this by the pixel. To me, it means that they're not rendering trillions of atoms at once, only what can be shown by the pixels on the screen. It might explain why they can render such static detail at incredibly long distances without LOD. |
I asked myself the same question, so I went digging into this. The whole problem with this isn't that you can't animate it, it's that the data structure they're using to hold this information that's the problem. The data is stored in a tree, if you have to animate something you have to either regenerate the tree in real time (Which is quite taxing on a cpu) or you hold multiple trees for multiple animations in memory (Which there isn't enough memory for). They might be able to make hardware for the tree generation to speed things up, but that might not be cost effective and the hardware vendors have to take a chance with it. Though hardware vendors went with tesselation instead, which one ends up being better used, we'll have to wait see. Though I think gaming will ultimately switch to voxels, the cpus and memory just isn't here and may not be here for a while.
