whats cool in game graphics

CrazyButcher

For a university talk I composed an overview on common rendering techniques in todays games (more or less the high-end ones). The material is a collection of stuff I have gathered in the last 5 years, although a lot is from recent siggraph courses.

Anyway it is not super technical as it is supposed to give rough outline on "everything" I quickly translated from German to English, so mind if there are language bugs left. (e.g closely look at the thumbnail)

For a proper scientific talk the sources would have to be specified in more detail but anyway if you want to know where certain info came from you can always ask me here



http://www-e.uni-magdeburg.de/kubisch/Whats_cool_in_game_graphics_eng.pdf

Michael Knubben

Judging by the screenshot, this is quality stuff. Diverse, complex stuff (for the technical idiot, aka me) explained in laymens terms is just what a lot of beginners could use. Thanks for sharing! If I check it out later, I'll email you any errors I find.

LEViATHAN

NVM

System

wow, the valve screenshot is amazing, looks better than the cry engine:poly134:

Junkie_XL

After looking at that, I feel the consoles have sort of reached a saturation point. I think the 360 & PS3 could go for another 5 years beyond 2012. There just seems like so much breathing room available yet to push these systems as new dev tools are created. Just adding more detail is just going to make the budgets larger and less profitable for right now.

The Wii is really the only system that needs an upgrade as far as visuals are concerned.

Joao Sapiro

thanks alot man super interesting read, i was looking for something like this for a while

danr

probably deeply nitpicking, but it gives me the chance to nerd up for once:

you used Turbo Esprit as a comparison to Need for Speed and Test Drive Unlimited ... except it wasn't a racing game, it was a free-roaming city-based drugs and guns game (with a play area as big or bigger than the one you quote for 2006)

i think the one you're after was probably Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge

Emil Mujanovic

This looks pretty sweet from just the thumbnail you posted. Downloading it as we speak. Thanks for the share, dude.

-caseyjones

MoP

Nice overview, thanks for posting!

oXYnary

Thanks for posting. I no longer have to tell the programmer, "you know that one thing"? While he sends daggers from his eyes.

carlo_c

Awesome, thanks for posting this

TheSplash

Nice collection, it would have been nice if you referenced the papers you used making it easier to find out more about a specific technique.

EarthQuake

Crazybutcher is a cool dude in game graphics.

IronHawk

that was pretty cool! Thanks man.

amadeux

i LOVE the in-game HDR.

urgaffel

Thanks a bunch for that, it will be handy when trying to get the programmers to add features and/or improve the stuff we have

Target_Renegade

Very interesting read. Thanks.

Michael Knubben

Rennspiel should probably read 'racing game'

It's also not as informative as I'd hoped, but it's a nice overview nevertheless.

CrazyButcher

it's a brief overview to get attention of students and get them into "looking for more". For more in-depth take on it, it would've taken more time and a proper "course". A lot of basic stuff isnt touched, or the complex isnt further explained...

if you want more detailed info on something specific just ask


I've added the important source links to the end of the slides now:
Siggraph
http://developer.amd.com/media/gpu_assets/Course_26_SIGGRAPH_2006.pdf
http://ati.amd.com/developer/SIGGRAPH07/Course28-Advanced_Real-Time_Rendering_in_3D_Graphics_and_Games_SIGGRAPH07.pdf
http://ati.amd.com/developer/SIGGRAPH08/Siggraph2008-Advances_in_Real-Time_Rendering_Course.pdf
GDC
http://ati.amd.com/developer/gdc/D3DTutorial08_FarCryAndDX9.pdf
http://ati.amd.com/developer/gdc/GDC2005_PracticalPRT.pdf
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/GDC2008_StylizationWithAPurpose_TF2.pdf
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2008/GDC2008_PostProcessingInTheOrangeBox.pdf
http://www.naughtydog.com/corporate/press/GDC%202008/UnchartedTechGDC2008.pdf
http://www.naughtydog.com/corporate/press/GDC%202008/PracticalSphericalHarmonicsBasedPRTmethods.pps
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/presentations/2008/GDC/GDC08_Ambient_Occlusion.pdf
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/presentations/2008/GDC/GDC08_SoftShadowMapping.pdf
Various
http://www.guerrilla-games.com/publications/dr_kz2_rsx_dev07.pdf
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/whats-new.php?ref=downloads
http://research.microsoft.com/~ppsloan/
http://www.punkuser.net/vsm/
http://www.punkuser.net/lvsm/
http://edusworld.org/ew/ficheros/2006/paginasWeb/making_of_sotc.html
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/20070131/3dlp.htm

Eric Chadwick

Christoph you rock.

CrazyButcher

as neox just asked me about post fx stuff, the basic operation for image filtering is "convolution".

basically the output for each pixel is a weighted sum of its neighbors and self.
imagine 3x3 weights & offsets with the middle pixel being the one we process.

different values yield different results, e.g if we do 1/9 as weight, we will get the classic "box car" filter (ie blur)

some more filter weights and results here
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/GDI-plus/csharpfilters.aspx

So in post processing you can use such filters to find "edges" say in depth buffer for basic silhouettes. You can blur an image for "glow" and so on...

Blurring a lot is same as "low-pass" filter in PS. To make this more efficient the image often isnt blurred at full res, but reduced in size along blurring, as we are not interested in sharp details anyway. That improves performance quite a bit, and doesnt affect quality much.

in rendering compute the texture offsets can be tricky, depending on the sampler type (there is rectangle textures and regular power of 2 ones) you can simply do +(1,0) for "next pixel right" or you would have to do +(1/width,0) ... anyway dont want to overcomplicate it hehe

killingpeople

Thanks for sharing this.

Kovac

Cool doc Butcher, thanks a ton for putting this together. Some of the killzone deffered rendering techniques you talked about based on the docs are an excellent full read when I found em a few months back.

CrazyButcher wrote: »

Blurring a lot is same as "low-pass" filter in PS. To make this more efficient the image often isnt blurred at full res, but reduced in size along blurring, as we are not interested in sharp details anyway. That improves performance quite a bit, and doesnt affect quality much.

We definitely had huge performance increases doing this. We use really small render targets and the results are very closely matched either way.

_Gr9yFox_

Thanks dude, that was very helpful.

Peris

SSAO rules, such a beautiful solution to a complex problem in realtime graphics.

Mark Dygert

Thats quality stuff! Thanks!

Pseudo

Thanks for sharing this.

SHEPEIRO

thank Q