The GT300/Fermi Thread

[zalbard]

lets face it, Crysis was not a very good game, not terrible, but everyone will agree with less focus on its trying to be photo realistic and more focus on gameplay it might could have been in a top 10 great games of all time.

No doubt, I was just looking at it from a technical standpoint.

But to an extent I do agree with you, exact photo realism of life in a game I see not happening for some time, it will come close sooner than we think, but i could be wrong. But the advancements being worked on at the current moment are looking bright.

4kx3k, where did you even get that number, I will tell you, this subject is a specialty of mine, and theres really no such thing as a proper realistic resolution.

This is the resolution of a human eye, I don't remember the absolutely exact number, but this is pretty close. I read about it a few years ago.
Edit: seems like the article I read a few years ago wasn't exactly correct.

How many pixels are needed to match the resolution of the human eye? Each pixel must appear no larger than 0.3 arc-minute. Consider a 20 x 13.3-inch print viewed at 20 inches. The Print subtends an angle of 53 x 35.3 degrees, thus requiring 53*60/.3 = 10600 x 35*60/.3 = 7000 pixels, for a total of ~74 megapixels to show detail at the limits of human visual acuity.

This seems to be reliable source.

He argues that if you want a lot of complex geometry in a game, than surely it will take a huge amount of time to create it.

I'm saying that in today's games they are already creating high poly models along with the normal, low poly in-game model. They use the high poly model to create normal maps, bump maps, ambient occlusion maps etc.. to enhance the shading on the low poly one. They are already creating high poly models for each box and each character in the game.

Well, yeah, 2x less work since you don't have to create a low poly model at best, fine. No arguing here. But do you think that your current high poly models are absolutely realistic? Do you not think that they do not look the same way as the stuff you can see through the window?
And the same applies to textures...

[Florinmocanu]

This is how a high poly model made right now for a game model looks.
I say it looks pretty damn convincing. And you should imagine that texturing already is quite good, even in games. The future will bring only improvements since a lot of texture resolution limitation will disapear.

[saaya]

texturing already pretty good? idk... depends on the game... but theres a reason there are so many high res texture mods for games...
whenever you use actual pictures to render a scene, it looks drastically more realistic, even if its very low poly...
i think theres a MUCH too high focus on poly counts in the modern graphics industry...

[Florinmocanu]

when i say texturing i mean the whole thing, the shading. The maps are low res, that's the problem, but they use normal maps, bump maps, specular maps, ambient occlusion maps, diffuse maps, now with DX 11 displacement maps etc.., almost the same as normal VFX shading, just that the maps are low quality because of size limitations. We need more vram, lots more and also we need to get rid of this gen of consoles.

With 2-3GB of vram actually getting fully used, you will see a huge difference in shading/texturing.

[kadozer]

when i say texturing i mean the whole thing, the shading. The maps are low res, that's the problem, but they use normal maps, bump maps, specular maps, ambient occlusion maps, diffuse maps, now with DX 11 displacement maps etc.., almost the same as normal VFX shading, just that the maps are low quality because of size limitations. We need more vram, lots more and also we need to get rid of this gen of consoles.

With 2-3GB of vram actually getting fully used, you will see a huge difference in shading/texturing.

Thanks for all your input I've read it all and I don't understand all of it but I gained some insight of 3d work.

[saaya]

when i say texturing i mean the whole thing, the shading. The maps are low res, that's the problem, but they use normal maps, bump maps, specular maps, ambient occlusion maps, diffuse maps, now with DX 11 displacement maps etc.., almost the same as normal VFX shading, just that the maps are low quality because of size limitations. We need more vram, lots more and also we need to get rid of this gen of consoles.

With 2-3GB of vram actually getting fully used, you will see a huge difference in shading/texturing.

well... there are 2gb gts250 cards... there are 1.7-2gb gt200 cards... but nobodies buying it... why? theres no advantage from it... no game lets you bump up the texture res and details to make use of the extra vram! :/

if there would be games that really made use of it... thats when im sure people would actually go out and buy cards with more mem, and vendors would build more cards with lots of mem... which would then push ati and nvidia to make it possible for their gpus to address even more memory...

im not buying a new vga... cause my gtx260 is fast enough...
whats the point? more fps i dont need... and yeah i could play crysis with aa and high res... but its not worth it...
if i could use larger textures and have much better texture res and quality and ingame looks, would i buy a new vga? sure!
id rather buy a 5770 with 2gb memory than a 5870 with 1gb...
and id pay the same or more for a 5770 with 3 or 4gb than a 5870 with 1gb...

[ajaidev]

GTA4 was a Video memory hog for 1080p with details on high, it ate quite a lot of Video memory from the gpu..

[saaya]

GTA4 was a Video memory hog for 1080p with details on high, it ate quite a lot of Video memory from the gpu..

thats what several people said... but i cant find any benchmarks showing a benefit of more than 1gb, even in gta4, even with max view distance...

[annihilat0r]

I thought the moderator had said no screwing with the tags?

[Florinmocanu]

well, for the moment, under standard gaming conditions (no mods) 1 GB is enough which tells the whole story. When a game will need 2-3GB of Vram to run properly, than you will see what a huge difference high quality texturing makes.

Because right now a lot of those high res map packs are a lot of time just resized low res textures. When a game will be designed with high quality textures, made by the artists, from scratch, the quality will go way up.

[saaya]

well, for the moment, under standard gaming conditions (no mods) 1 GB is enough which tells the whole story. When a game will need 2-3GB of Vram to run properly, than you will see what a huge difference high quality texturing makes.

Because right now a lot of those high res map packs are a lot of time just resized low res textures. When a game will be designed with high quality textures, made by the artists, from scratch, the quality will go way up.

cant we have something in between? thats something that has been bothering me for years! it used to be that when a game came out, playing it at max details was impossible... and that was a GOOD thing... caused it pushed hw development and it made a game more fun to play again a year after it came out, this time at max details...

nowadays games come out and run with max details on mainstream hardware... then wth do we need highend hardware for to begin with?
cant we go back to having huge textures that kill performance for most cards or maybe even all current cards, but they are there and create demand for faster cards with more vram? games will benefit, end users will benefit, hardware vendors will benefit...

right now everybody is really cheap on hardware specs... nobody wants to demand too much from the hardware, its almost as if game developers try to underbid each other on how old and crappy hardware their games can still run... that doesnt benefit anybody... people with old and slow hw wont have fun with the game cause it looks like crap, and people with up to date hardware feel like they wasted a lot of money, and rightfully so, cause theres really close to no benefit of highend hardware today...

nvidia and ati should pay game developers to bring back REAL "high" and "ultra" settings in games... that would stimulate the pc gaming industry a lot i think...

[zalbard]

And you should imagine that texturing already is quite good, even in games.

It seems to be hardware limited at the moment. I mean, look at DAO, they had some great high res textures, but the devs simply have not included them...

well, for the moment, under standard gaming conditions (no mods) 1 GB is enough which tells the whole story. When a game will need 2-3GB of Vram to run properly, than you will see what a huge difference high quality texturing makes.

Because right now a lot of those high res map packs are a lot of time just resized low res textures. When a game will be designed with high quality textures, made by the artists, from scratch, the quality will go way up.

This is a lame part of it. No one wants to make the step forward.
The devs don't release games with very high quality textures cause the hardware does not have more than 1GB of RAM for the most part. Hardware manufacturers (primarily ATI with 5xxx cards) observe the gaming market, find no need for more than 1GB of RAM and limit their cards for exactly this amount...
I suppose we have to blame consoles for this as well, yeah, they have even less VRAM than that, and a lot of dev studios aren't interested in using more resources to make the PC version better looking.
Hopefully Fermi with 1.5GB of RAM and coming-after-Fermi 5870-SIX with 2GB of RAM will improve the situation.

when i say texturing i mean the whole thing, the shading. The maps are low res, that's the problem, but they use normal maps, bump maps, specular maps, ambient occlusion maps, diffuse maps, now with DX 11 displacement maps etc.., almost the same as normal VFX shading, just that the maps are low quality because of size limitations. We need more vram, lots more and also we need to get rid of this gen of consoles.

With 2-3GB of vram actually getting fully used, you will see a huge difference in shading/texturing.

Gotta love ATI sticking to 1GB cards, huh?...

[Florinmocanu]

Remember Fear when it came out, god damn, that was a demanding game.

[saaya]

Remember Fear when it came out, god damn, that was a demanding game.

yeah, we need more games like this...
and not like cod or battlefield which are super demanding but look like crap

[Florinmocanu]

what we need right now is more displacement usage in DX 11, to actually start to show off good quality models and 2 GB needed for games. Hopefully, Crysis 2 will bring these things, since the engine is also DX 11. I have high hopes for it to raise the stakes in this industry.

[zalbard]

what we need right now is more displacement usage in DX 11, to actually start to show off good quality models and 2 GB needed for games. Hopefully, Crysis 2 will bring these things, since the engine is also DX 11. I have high hopes for it to raise the stakes in this industry.

It won't be out till 2011. What a pity, really.
But yeah, I have high hopes for it as well.

[LesGrossman]

I thought the moderator had said no screwing with the tags?

"off topic train wreck"

This thread is a can of whoopass.

[RoadconeTuning]

the tags are getting pretty hilarious btw.

fwiw, this nvidia fanboy ordered a 5850 earlier today because this unicorn card has taken forever to appear...

oh and FEAR was freaking awesome... i loved getting banned from servers for supposedly hacking...

[ElSel10]

For the record playing with tags is against the rules here and we can/do track who adds on and can/do give infractions for messing with the system.

At the end of the day good tags = traffic for XS, so let's leave them be, OK guys?

So what ever happened with this?

[***Deimos***]

Or a different way to access a pool of system memory, fast.

Even though memory throughput to the GPU is not a bottleneck, the limited amounts are. I'd like to see AMD and NV invest in a new memory transfer protocol so that graphics chips can enjoy fast transfers from their VRAM but have a faster way to access system RAM than todays normal Memory caching methods. Since this is evident with yesteryears architecture (GT200 chokes when it runs out of memory) I can only hope that NV (and ati) look further than wait for PCIe 3.0 where basically doubling bandwidth to 32GB/s only puts it around 15% of the VRAM bandwidth.

Solving that bottleneck would allow for massive amounts of textures in game.

Other way around. Bandwidth IS THE bottleneck. The 4k x 4k texture mentioned earlier is only 5-10MB depending on compression. You can easily fit dozens of these.

If you had no mipmaps, and the wall, door, ceiling, floor and table (5+ normal maps, + shadow maps) each used 4kx4k, even though each would occupy small amount of your 19x12 screen (and hence overkill, little benefit unless you stick your nose up against the wall, and why nobody does this), the bandwidth demand would bring even 5870 down to 1fps. Ofcourse, game developers dont make games just for people with 2GB cards.. they need to provide good gameplay on common platform.. ie 8800GT 512MB.

Its actually quite easy to test this in real life. Hookup a couple 30" LCDs. Fire up GoogleEarth. Monitor memory usage with Rivatuner. Maximize GoogleEarth across both screens (wait for it to load and cache everything).. you now have equivalent of a 8MP texture.

How is the frame rate compared to the memory usage...?

[***Deimos***]

hmmm why? whats the agressive step nvidia took with fermi?
the ability to handle more geometry?

..

different approach to geometry processing (polymorph engine), and native C++ support through unified memory architecture.. kinda reminds me of 286 segmented memory space.

Can't believe something so basic took so long to come to GPU.

Just want to clarify earlier comments about Crysis and rendering quality. Having users choose between "MEDIUM", "HIGH" etc, is an abomination. LOD where distant trees pop out of nowhere is pathetic. Not to mention the unsightly mess of "rock" textures stretched and smeared over long triangles and poorly stiched together.

I'm very optimistic about Carmack's general approachs. Its exactly what's needed. Virtual textures (just like GoogleEarth) where details show up gradually and automatically.

Sparse Voxels for geometry to finally fix the impossible to tell difference of 100 triangles/pixel. Geometry that automatically and gradually scales, and circumvents need for parlor tricks like normal maps. I'm looking forward to somebody making Abyss water tenticle or T1000 soon.

Some games are even using smarter networking algorithms which get better ping for characters near or in FOV of you. What's the point of constantly sending you updates of characters on other side of map?

[BigCactus]

I would love to see a game that looks as good as avatar without the 3d glasses. I have a feeling we won't see this in a good 10-20 years.

[Sly Fox]

I would love to see a game that looks as good as avatar without the 3d glasses. I have a feeling we won't see this in a good 10-20 years.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic but I doubt it will take quite that long.

I mean, go back to the PS2 era and show someone footage of even the original Gears of War. They'd tell you "no way that's real time, gtfo."

[Florinmocanu]

Other way around. Bandwidth IS THE bottleneck. The 4k x 4k texture mentioned earlier is only 5-10MB depending on compression. You can easily fit dozens of these.

If you had no mipmaps, and the wall, door, ceiling, floor and table (5+ normal maps, + shadow maps) each used 4kx4k, even though each would occupy small amount of your 19x12 screen (and hence overkill, little benefit unless you stick your nose up against the wall, and why nobody does this), the bandwidth demand would bring even 5870 down to 1fps. Ofcourse, game developers dont make games just for people with 2GB cards.. they need to provide good gameplay on common platform.. ie 8800GT 512MB.

Its actually quite easy to test this in real life. Hookup a couple 30" LCDs. Fire up GoogleEarth. Monitor memory usage with Rivatuner. Maximize GoogleEarth across both screens (wait for it to load and cache everything).. you now have equivalent of a 8MP texture.

How is the frame rate compared to the memory usage...?

Your right and your wrong.

If all the textures in a game would be 4k? i mean all barrels, boxes, chickens, rats etc.., you would probably have 20-30 GB of only textures, or even more. So a framebuffer of a minimum 3-4 GB is needed if you want to be able to move through such a world. consider 10-12 GB as the needed Vram if you want to actually run such a game fluently.

What i want is to see games with textures of 1-2k for everything. Right now they use 256pixels and 512 pixels textures for a lot of things, almost 50-60% of game props.

Maybe with the next gen of consoles games with such textures (1-2k for everything) will become the standard.

[JohnZS]

It almost brings a tear to my eye seeing people agree with me when I say that 1GB is not enough for a modern high end enthusiast all bells and whistles graphics card.
There was a time when I was shot down when I said that Oblivion + High Res texture packs choaked 1GB VRAM cards.
A time when I said that GTA IV DOES benefit from 2GB VRAM (as proven by a STOCK Palit 2GB GTX 285 out performing a 1GB eVGA 285 SSC).
A time when I said that S.T.A.L.K.E.R really does love VRAM.. especially when you put the mods onto it.
Is the world changing, or am I dreaming?
I really do hope Fermi starts with 1.5GB and has a 3GB option for consumer cards.
I guess we are too soon for the 6GB Quadro part to be also a consumer part, but who knows what 2011 may bring
John