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Geek Culture / realtime photo realism with UE4

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Phaelax
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Posted: 22nd Mar 2019 21:29
If this short clip was truly record from real-time processing, then I'm impressed on a level I haven't been in a very long time.

https://petapixel.com/2019/03/22/this-is-how-photorealistic-video-game-engines-are-now/
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Kevin Picone
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Posted: 23rd Mar 2019 12:14
Yeah agreed

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Raven
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Posted: 23rd Mar 2019 12:25
Quixel Libraries are already used for a large majority of games today.
It's a fantastic resource (albeit quite expensive) of very high quality digital images converted for usage as HDR Physically Based Material Sources.
And sure, when you don't have those pesky limitations such-as Mainstream Video Memory (2-4GB) to worry about., you can produce some exceptionally High Fidelity Results, that are arguably very close to Cinematic Quality.

At least in terms of Environments.
But notice the lack of life within the scenes... no Animals, no People, etc.
Beautiful but Dead Environments.

Look Modern Hardware, especially High-End have quite substantial Video Memory and are capable of pushing somewhat insane Triangle Counts / Frame.
If we just take something Low-End., such-as the Ryzen 5 2400G with Vega 8... that's capable of ~80M Tris/Frame., provided we're talking about Static (basic Transform & Shaded) with PBR actually being quite a Lightweight Compute Shading Solution on Asynchronous Hardware (as we're sharing a lot of the resources, which really cuts down on the expensive calls such-as Depth Buffers or alike).

As such, this means we can get away with 1.26M Triangles / Scene at 60Hz., now you combine that with the ability to throughput ~320M Pixel / Scene (at 60Hz) … well this allows for some exceptionally High-Quality Image Output., provided a lot of what we're doing is "Static" … more so if we're not talking about a lot of Overdraw.
Just because these are no longer Modern Metrics that GPU Manufacturer' List, nor do Tech Media even seem to care about measuring such... doesn't mean that suddenly such things became unimportant. It's just typically speaking the Compute and Threading started to become a more important metric to determine general performance capabilities.

i.e. Jungle Scenes have a lot of Flora, that requires a lot of Overdraw due to Transparency / Alpha., this essentially doubles *per Layer* of Overdraw the Performance Cost... this is oft improved in Modern Engines with various Transparency Order Calculators to perform more simplistic Accept & Discard approach that reduces the Overdraw Count., but still if you want "Realism" you somewhat MUST omit such approaches.

Still again notice how none of the scenes have a lot of Flora present... instead it's all Dead, Desolate and Industrial.
This isn't to say that the "Real-Time" Machinima isn't visually appealing., but rather that people will oft leap to the notion that "This is something we could see in Real-Time Applications., such-as Games" in the near future is oft misguided.

I mean look., there are areas of Battlefront (as DICE heavily use Quixel Resources) that look Photorealistic., something you can capture in Screenshots and be like "Look at what can be achieved" … and sure, it's impressive., but anyone who has actually played Battlefront / Battlefront 2 knows full well... it doesn't ALWAYS look like those Screenshots.
When we're talking about a Pre-Rendered / Pre-Scripted effort., well you can fully control things so that any 'problematic' areas that break the illusion of the quality can be reduced... you're creating the Scene specifically for the intended Framing., the same is true for Movies in General... there's a lot of careful editing that goes into them (well normally speaking) to make them look as seamless and believable as possible.

< • >

In some ways, I think this is partially why Tech Demos for each new Generation of GPU (AMD/NVIDIA) stopped being produced.
Not because new Features weren't being added that could dramatically improve what was possible with advancements, but because there was a false expectation of what the Hardware could realistically accomplish in actual Real-Time Scenarios Vs. the Tailor Made Tech Demo.

Don't get me wrong., I would highly recommend a Subscription to Quixel should you be interested in creating Realistic Environments for your Game(s).
It's an exceptional library that is professionally sourced, and edited taking A LOT of work out of getting High-Quality Texture Sources, which then can be used in Material creation with things such-as Marmoset or Substance Materials.

And I think it would be a good idea to suggest to TGC that they support either/or both Marmoset and Substance Material System (heck I'd even suggest they support Autodesk' Shader FX System) because these are industry standards.
I'm just saying, don't read too deeply into individual Technical Demonstration Pieces / Projects., especially those done by Art Students as part of their Long-Term Projects / Demo Reels... as there's a bit more work that goes into producing something of such High Visual Quality than simply using the same Resource Libraries., and such projects can be exceptionally time consuming too.
That's not always the best utilisation of Development Time.
Phaelax
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Posted: 25th Mar 2019 02:00
Raven? There's a user I haven't seen in a decade!

At the beginning of the video, if you look closely at the blade of grass, you'll see it's movement isn't quite so realistic. But I would agree that foliage is more difficult to create than rocks.
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Raven
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Posted: 25th Mar 2019 18:33
Phaelax wrote: "Raven? There's a user I haven't seen in a decade!"


Heh., I was thinking about seeing about getting my original account resurrected.
This one is far less "Infamous" … but still I was feeling a little nostalgic., yet on the other hand I was expecting a bit more evolution and modernisation to have occurred.

Like, don't get me wrong., it's cool to see a lot of regulars whom I recognise (and likely visa-versa) but at the same time … it's been over a decade.
In a way I expected more of an evolution to have occurred, where-as instead it's more like the community has been frozen-in-time.
Phaelax
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Posted: 25th Mar 2019 21:08
I think the community has died down quite a bit compared to what it used to be. I could log it at any time and see dozens of new posts to read, and now it's like I can check every few days and haven't missed anything.
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Posted: 30th Mar 2019 18:11 Edited at: 5th Apr 2019 16:23
Quote: ""If we just take something Low-End., such-as the Ryzen 5 2400G with Vega 8... that's capable of ~80M Tris/Frame.""


MOD EDIT: Removed link.
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Phaelax
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Posted: 1st Apr 2019 07:41
Umm, you guys could've removed his link on top of banning..... Ya know, so us unsuspecting folks don't load that giant floppy thing on our screens. Now amazon is gonna see I looked at it and start recommending me weird items.
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Raven
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Posted: 1st Apr 2019 23:08
I'm suspecting what was linked I'd need that new fangled "Adult Content" License to view...

Although while my figure was an est. for a more concrete delineation of performance:
Perform is quite easily calculated as we're talking (Vega 8) of 512:32:16
512 × 1100MHz × 2 [Op/Cycle] = 1.126 Trillion Math Operations / Second (18.78 Billion / Frame @ 60Hz)
32 × 1100MHz × 2 [Op/Cycle] = 70.4 Billion Pixel Operations / Second (1.17 Billion / Frame @ 60Hz)
16 × 1100MHz × 2 [Op/Cycle] = 35.2 Billion Tris Operations / Second (586 Million / Frame @ 60Hz)

The one we're focused on here is the Triangles / Frame., of which we can handle up to 8 Shared Pixel Pipelines (for Shading Purposes) meaning we're talking about 73.3 Million Triangles / Frame @ 60Hz.
Of course this is a crass approach, where we're not accounting for the Resolution at play... the Higher the Resolution, the more Pixel Operations are required per Rasterised Triangle, but not strictly the Number of Triangles.
This is simple to calculate when we're talking about an Opaque Scene with no Overdraw., because at 1080p we're talking 124.4 Million Pixel Operations and 1.99 Billion Texel Operations to hit Peak Triangle Throughput (per Frame).
And then this gets even more complex when we start to delve into Caching / Memory Latency.

I'd say for "Practical" Purposes we're actually looking at some where around 9.16 Million Triangles / Scene for the Vega 8., at least if we're talking about DirectX 9 / 10 / 11 / OpenGL.
For DirectX 12., because there aren't so many State Change Barriers; then you can get much closer to the Theoretical Peak.
Actually one of the key "Failures" in a way of the GCN Architecture is that AMD opted for Half the Cache that the Architecture was designed to used... this results in, well Lower Pixel Throughput than the Hardware is practically capable of., at least with Large Queue Operations (because it literally can't store the whole queue, thus has to use the much Slower / Higher Latency Video Memory)

So, I was only slightly over est. the only thing I really got wrong was the Vega 8 is on the R3 2200G not R5 2400G, which uses the Vega 11.
Jeku
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Posted: 5th Apr 2019 16:23
FYI I removed the same link in another thread he posted this at. Seems he has done this in multiple places so I'm going to add time to his ban.
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Kohaku
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Posted: 8th Apr 2019 22:27 Edited at: 8th Apr 2019 22:31
I've watched this video a few times now. Really is quite something.

Did anyone else find the change in light (sunlight it looks like) seem a bit too sudden though?

Seems they missed a potentially epic light-popping-up-over-the-hill moment there!
Kevin Picone
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Posted: 10th Apr 2019 11:41

https://vimeo.com/326563187


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Ortu
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Posted: 10th Apr 2019 18:34
Nice breakdown, thanks!
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