opengl

Have we reached the end of the road for conventional 3D rendering?

Siggraph 2009 ended Friday, and I've spent the last few days digesting what I learned there. Although I've been involved in the graphics industry since 1990 and I've attended Siggraph most years since 1992, a crisis of sorts seems to have snuck up on me.

At the High Performance Graphics conference before the main show, keynote speeches from Larry Gritz of Sony Pictures Imageworks and Tim Sweeney of Epic Games showed that traditional 3D-rendering methods are being augmented and even supplanted by new techniques for motion-picture production as well as real-time computer games.

Gritz reckoned that 3D became a fully integrated element of the moviemaking process in 1989 when computer-generated characters first interacted with human characters in James Cameron's "The Abyss."

Gritz described how Imageworks has moved to a new ray-tracing rendering system called "Arnold" for several films currently in production, replacing the Reyes (Render Everything Your Eyes See) rendering system, probably the most widely used technology in the industry.

According to Gritz, Reyes rendering led to unmanageable complexity in the artistic component of the production process, outweighing the render-time advantages of the Reyes method. But Gritz says even these advantages diminished as the demand for higher quality drove Imageworks to make more use of ray tracing and a sophisticated lighting model called global illumination.

The bottom line for Imageworks is that Arnold, which was licensed from Marcos Fajardo of Solid Angle, takes longer to do the final rendering, but is easier on the artists and makes it easier to create the models and lighting effects--a net win.

Sweeney echoed this theme the next day, which surprised me considering Sweeney's focus is real-time rendering for 3D games--notably with Epic's Unreal Engine, which has been used in hundreds of 3D games on all the major platforms. Game rendering uses far less sophisticated techniques because each frame has to be rendered in perhaps one-sixtieth of a second, not the four or five hours on average that can be devoted to a single frame of a motion picture.

It seems that Sweeney is also… Read more

Two companies--respectively (I believe) the smallest and largest makers of graphics chips--announced on Sunday that they are developing new standard APIs (application programming interfaces) specifically for ray-traced computer graphics.

Caustic Graphics introduced CausticGL, an API designed to leverage the best aspects of OpenGL, the most widely supported 3D API on the market. CausticGL ties in with Caustic's accelerator chips and boards, which the company says can deliver some 20X the ray-tracing performance of a conventional CPU.

Nvidia offered OptiX (pronounced like "optics"), a name designed to resonate with PhysX, the physics API acquired last year when Nvidia … Read more

Apple had its own E3 press conference at the beginning of the week, with its newest model in the iPhone line finally being unveiled to the world. The iPhone 3G S, while in some ways a modest upgrade, introduces significant improvements for gamers--some obvious, others not so much. Will it help even further cement their growing position in a handheld games market previously dominated by Nintendo and Sony? Read on.

Faster processor speed, more RAM. T-Mobile leaked the hard 3G S specs, and they're all-around zippier than the old 3G--which Apple confirmed when it promised overall speeds up to 2x faster. This will matter in particular with game load times and game crashes, both of which can tend to plague an overstuffed iPhone. While the spec bumps are relatively modest, the iPhone's game-playing prowess has already been more impressive than early pundits predicted, especially on recent releases like The Sims 3 and a PC-perfect port of Myst. The only thing missing now is...

Proper controller support. Sneaked in under the radar amid the iPhone 3G S news is the fact that the 3.0 software update allows third-party app interfacing with peripherals. While a larger focus on this functionality has been on medical devices, it's now possible for someone to make a clip-on control pad case and to have that controller be usable in any game. What should happen is that publishers gather to designate one universal controller that then gets adopted as the iPhone's "gamepad." The question is, who will make that accessory? For a while last year it was rumored to be Belkin, although it was unclear who would support the device. On consoles, the manufacturer usually settles these issues by making the controller themselves (except in the case of peripheral-driven games like Rock Band).

While it would be easiest if Apple made a gamepad, it's entirely unlikely. The whole appeal of the iPhone is its interface simplicity--too many plug-ins kill the minimalist chic. If a third party makes a controller, there's a likelihood that some publishers would support it, while others splinter off under some other controller accessory. Either way, someone should make sure there's a good consensus. Otherwise, soon enough we'll be buried in plastic miniperipherals, not unlike what's currently happening to (or plaguing) game consoles.… Read more

Wish you could play Crysis in your Web browser? Two influential organizations are banding together to try to bring accelerated 3D graphics to the Web, a move that eventually could improve online games and other Web applications.

The Web is gradually becoming a better foundation for applications with splashy, sophisticated interfaces, but 3D graphics on the Web remain primitive. Now, though, Mozilla, the group behind the Firefox browser, and Khronos, the consortium that oversees the widely used OpenGL graphics interface technology, are trying to jointly create a standard for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web.

In response to a Mozilla … Read more