http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&list=PL73FAE94F18307EC6&index=21
The point of this is that you don't need a powerful GPU.
Ya,but still need a fairly decent one though.
Actually, those demos are CPU only, they'll need the gpu for animation, shading, etc. I think it may be a massive challenge to animate all those points, though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVB1ayT6Fdc
At 25:25 he mentions it's cpu only, it's easy to render because it only pulls the dots it needs for the resolution, what I'm worried about is animating the dots, because they'll have to move all of the dots.
At 28:00 he describes the method.
Really?! Wow. I think it still needs a few year before it can be used in game.
Voxel engines aren't exactly new lol. I think they've been discussed here before using this exact video.
I hope you guys know this is essentially a scam...
"Ahh, sparse voxel octrees. Carmack intends to use them in the id Tech 6 engine (post-Rage). Here's what the video didn't mention: you can't animate these. They are as utterly inflexible as sprites. The closest you can come is to define every frame, can still have amazing object detail, but can't be procedurally animated (e.g. by ragdoll physics) and will move at a fixed framerate with no obvious tweening method. You can have this voxel world and it will look awesome, but it will be almost completely static. By the sound of things this company is using a binary search like the PULS 256-byte raytracing demo, so at least bounding volumes will work and moving static objects around won't be a huge performance issue.
Five-sided lettuce, on the other hand, can be tessellated into thousand-sided lettuce and molded in accordance with its depth & normal maps, which can in turn use virtual texture quadtrees to have infinite two-dimensional detail (see id Tech 5). The underlying model of dozens or hundreds of polygons can be warped, skewed, or reshaped at an arbitrary framerate from sparse keyframes or procedural instructions.
I like the technology presented, but the presentation itself is vapid and disingenuous. This is not a cure-all. Even Carmack is only using it in conjunction with polygonal actors." -Mindbleach (http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bbg9c/unlimited_detail_the_end_of_poligon_based/)
But many games today are not very CPU heavy ... Could they just utlilize more cpu power to render some of what he is talking about ?
If a CPU can render that, imagine what a GPU could output...
hmm, fogive me if i get this wrong, but from whats been said on this, its impossible to animate?