Unlimited Detail
John Carmack talked about this briefly in his Q&A portion of his keynote at Quakecon. I'll see if I can dig up a decent Youtube of it, but basically he said this isn't technology that's going to be really available for 5 or 10 years at minimum.
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I've read an article about voxel rendering (in the c't if you know what magazine this is) some time ago. Voxel rendering was once or twice used in actual computer games around 1995 or so, but could never etablish its place in camparison to polygon rendering. You basically have a really detailed model grid, for example 10000 x 10000 x 10000 Voxel, and the further you are away from the object, the less detailed is the grid shown. It is automatically transferred to 1000 x 1000 x 1000, 100 x 100 x 100 and so on.
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What I want to know is, if this technology is 5-10 years away, where will polygon based wireframe engines be in that time, maybe it will be so good that it will be just as good as voxel technology. We only need so much detail before it become redundant. Do you really care if the dirt on the ground is 3 or part of a texture?
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Boy I've never heard this before. Who needs more than 640K of memory? I remember playing the first Unreal when I was like 12 and thinking "this is it, graphics in video games will never get better than this".
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ok it was naive of me to think that, but I still want to know, do you think polygon based technology will be that good in 5-10 years?
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I think it will continue to improve, yes. There's no telling to what point.
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we are already able to render items at a detail greater than necessary.
Give you an example... 16mp cameras... capture WAY more information than the average human eye can really use. Now... we use the information we DO see in ways different than just "static image capturing" so granted that's not a completely fair argument...
But the same is true with audio compression...
Eventually we will have computer graphics that are HIGHER than real life resolution.
Wouldn't you need a computer larger than the space you were trying to emulate?
If you were going to have 1 byte per atom ... I think a byte of data physically takes up a bit more space than that.
I'm sorry, but I have to call foul on this one mainly because it's somewhat impossible. There's no way something can be at a higher-than-real-life resolution, simply because real life is the benchmark or defining measurement of a resolution. It depends on what type of graphics you're talking about (2D, 3D, etc.) but the basic point still stands.
For example: imagine you have a piece of paper. Very crude graphics would simply represent that sheet as one polygon with no thickness. More advanced graphics might use many polygons connected at vertices and edges capable of rotating, flexing, and stretching to simulate the flexibility of actual paper. Even more advanced graphics would simulate individual molecules, or on a more accurate scale, individual atoms, of the sheet, using given information and properties of the molecules or atoms to realistically represent how a piece of paper responds to its environment and stimuli in the real world. The level of detail can keep getting smaller and smaller until you're simulating, say, the bits of energy that make up quarks (as predicted by some form of string theory, I think). You can keep getting smaller and smaller but you'll never be able to simulate nature at a higher resolution than that at which it actually exists, because, well, on some level it exists at an infinitely high resolution.
I may be arguing a semantics point here but still.
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