Volca on 1/8/2008 at 19:42
Quote Posted by Eabin
and, most importantly, skin can be made to actually look like skin, not like plastic :)
Yep. Although subsurface scattering can also be aproximated using todays hardware.
june gloom on 1/8/2008 at 21:30
I'd argue that HL2 manages to make its characters' skin look more real than other games. Obviously it's not perfect but it's still way more believable than the shrinkwrap brigade of its contemporaries.
The_Raven on 1/8/2008 at 22:15
Yeah, I noticed that too. I wonder if there was any tweaking with their lighting in order to achieve that effect.
The Alchemist on 1/8/2008 at 22:23
Didn't our Lord and Savior John Carmack say that ray tracing provided few benefits with too much increase in processing?
The_Raven on 1/8/2008 at 22:44
Sounds about right.
ignatios on 1/8/2008 at 23:55
What I want to know his how many more years before we get games with
originality and fun.
Oh right, (
http://www.gog.com/en/intro) September.
Muzman on 1/8/2008 at 23:59
Quote Posted by dethtoll
I'd argue that HL2 manages to make its characters' skin look more real than other games. Obviously it's not perfect but it's still way more believable than the shrinkwrap brigade of its contemporaries.
Crysis did this well too, I think. Their skin actually looked dry.
Quote Posted by The Alchemist
Didn't our Lord and Savior John Carmack say that ray tracing provided few benefits with too much increase in processing?
Doesn't that usually mean he's working on it right now and he doesn't want anyone else to bother?
catbarf on 2/8/2008 at 15:11
Quote Posted by IndieInIndy
In theory, raytracing gives you real-time shadows, soft shadows, radiosity, reflection, and other lighting effects "for free". Throw even more rays at it, and you get antialiasing as well. The down side includes "sizzling" and aliasing problems for details and distant objects... but you can reduce that by throwing even more rays at it. In other words, the more cores and more memory your system has, the higher FPS and screen size you can get.
So, in theory at least, graphics capability becomes more dependent on the processor than the GPU?
addink on 2/8/2008 at 15:45
Not necessarily. Modern GPUs are perfectly capable of doing advanced math (vertex shaders for instance have nothing to do with rendering pixels, but are processed by the GPU), especially the later cards are setup to basically be parallel processing units that don't forcibly lay down the use of the registers, unlike the predecessors that are parallel pixel processing machines.
So it should be possible to setup a raytracing algorithm that uses the parallel processing power of the GPU.
catbarf on 2/8/2008 at 15:55
Interesting. Would it be at least possible to use the processor for these calculations? If so, that could allow some serious optimization based on processor and graphics capabilities.
