I'm not sure if there's a topic for this already on the forums, but just in case there's not...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Watch this.

I'm seriously fucking amazed, and if it proves practical to implement...

Just wow.

If they licensed the perfected form of this technology out to the industry 'big-wigs' (Epic, EA -bunch of cunts-, Blizzard, VALVe), it'd become industry standard within a few years.

Thoughts?

 

Bunch of PR wank.

The numbers are unreasonably high and the technology is not even close enough to run this in real time. It might be useful in five or so years at best.

 

That's all good. Now let's see it animated with non-trivial logic on top of it.

As people said, there's a lot of cool things you can do with graphics. Making a game out of it, on the other hand...

 

I agree completely. At the risk of yet another bitchstorm as I allude to what I do in my day job,

Spoiler

The team I lead has run the largest particle simulations of physics phenomena on several of the world's largest supercomputers. The state of the art with these calculations is to track at most a few trillion particles on hundreds of thousands of processors. (10 billion particles is the buy-in for a "heroic" calculation nowadays). These machines draw of order 10 megawatts of power; our largest calculations take virtually the entire machines. In other words, this ain't the kind of thing you load into your PS3.

The video's 20+ trillion particles claims beggar belief: even a static setting with 20+ trillion particles would take of order 240 TB of memory to store. Most people don't have a quarter of a petabyte of disk space, much less RAM to blow saving state data for a virtual world. This doesn't get into how you would stream these data into processing units to enable real-time rendering and physics interaction (as would be required for a game). I call bullshit.

 

Like others have said, this is pure sensationalism. Jorm, here is a related discussion by people who actually know this stuff.

 

@Naeblis. Nice link and helped explain what was missing from the OP's link. Had to look up a shit-load what they were talking about, though. Still, learned quite a bit about how how graphics are rendered and how hard it is to get it right.

 

Even with all the sensationalism in the video, it still is an interesting bit of tech. I have no idea how long it would take for this to be viable in gaming and other programs but its still a nice look at what could be coming down the pipe over the next decade.

Thanks for the link Naeblis, took a bit of work to understand but I feel less ignorant now which is always nice.