Rendering a Frame of Deus Ex: Human Revolution 81
An anonymous reader writes "Video games are among the most computationally intensive applications. The amount of calculation achieved in a few milliseconds can sometimes be mind-blowing. This post about the breakdown of a frame rendering in Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes us through the different steps of the process. It explains in detail the rendering passes involved, the techniques as well as the algorithms processed by a computer — 60 times per second."
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Right, it's not an interesting technical problem to render a scene with lots of interesting lighting effects. No one would ever want to read about that, because game play is more important.
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People who work on games will find it interesting. I know I did.
Re: forget the gameplay! (Score:3, Insightful)
Omg I've landed on you tubes comments pages - and to think I thought I was being linked to a tech site
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Pretty sure quantitative analysis is where money intersects with math.
Re:forget the gameplay! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd have more sympathy with you if the new-releases list on Steam these days wasn't completely buried by "retro 8-bit style" indie roguelikes which look dreadful and usually play that way as well.
These days, I've gone beyond "it's not the graphics that matter, it's the gameplay" to "they both matter, seriously". The former has become a go-to excuse for lazy development.
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"Arborea was covered in several Amiga magazines, which predictably focused on the graphics, sound, and music rather than the actual gameplay elements. (The May 1991 review from CU Amiga begins by giving thanks that "the days [are gone] when a role-playing game meant little more than a great leap
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And yet... I have had masses of fun over the last 6 months with Farcry 4, Dragon Age 3, Alien Isolation and Forza Horizon 2. Big, AAA technical-powerhouse games. And all of them more enjoyable than anything I've seen come out of the indie-sector.
It is a commonly-held myth - but a myth nonetheless - that good graphics and good gameplay are mutually exclusive.
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No, but I just looked at its Steam page and it looks like yet another pseudo-8-bit sprite art game. Local multiplayer oriented... no singleplayer to speak of and, looking at the trailer, nothing particular gripping about the concept either. Not interested.
I'll stick to Farcry 4 and Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters for now, until Bloodborne comes out in a couple of weeks.
Re:forget the gameplay! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Deus Ex we are talking about so the gameplay is good by definition. Even the shitty Invisible War was better than most of other similar games of the period.
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Ha, good point! I didn't think IW was that good yet I played it to completion (which I don't do very often with games) so it must have been good enough.
The problem, other than the console-itis, was that the original DE was SOOOO good, it would have been hard to step into those shoes.
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well that and the bugs.
pretty crappy though that it had console-itis, yet was slow on computers vastly more powerful than the xbox.
still, played it through... but the inventory system.. damn.
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Gameplay is king, but the game mechanics are relatively trivial to write.
Graphics are fluff but damn there's some serious engineering involved.
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That would be "rended". Rendered is something different: molten, melted.
Bad form.... (Score:1, Offtopic)
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It stops if you mouse over it.
Sounds hard (Score:2)
Let's outsource the boss fights.
Vents (Score:4, Funny)
Didn't know it takes that much to render the inside of vents.
That game was played by finding vents and going through them.
The police station mission was cool but the rest, vents, and more vents.
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I guess it all depends on your play style. I spent nearly no rime in vents, but I prefer combat.
Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Over 500 draw calls per frame. I've only ever tinkered in basic OpenGL stuff, but does that seem like an awful lot to anyone else? I was always told to reduce draw calls and to use the newer OpenGL features as they were able to batch commands on thousands of vectors, etc. (or are we talking about different types of draw calls?)
Especially as a lot of the work is done in shaders and shared between passes according to the article?
Wonder what kind of texture etc. bandwidth that's pushing.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
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500 per frame isn't even much. Based on some apitrace runs I've done, MMOs can easily hit a few thousand draw calls and 10k+ API calls total per frame.
There's just that many things visible at once and batching the work is hard because of unique object graphics and legacy APIs used to support as many legacy Windows systems as possible.
Intel must love these games --- no AMD CPU is going to run them well when half the work is in a single thread managing a bloated graphics API's state.
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Precisely what Vulkan and the new Direct3D hope to address.
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500 draw calls per frame is tiny. This is actually a rather boring scene -- it's indoors, you don't need to render anything outside the walls (save for the room through the glass window in the back), and even then the scenery is somewhat sparse. In open world games or any game with a detailed horizon, this blows up to many thousands of draw calls per pass (so 10k+ for frame).
Graphics pipelines are pretty good at stomping through draw calls as long as you don't make expensive state changes (e.g. changing ble
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of course they do that.
if you drew 1 triangle / draw call or old school like that, just the hand in the scene would exhaust 500.
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Frames (Score:1)
I almost never run anything at 60fps. Saying you need it that fast is like saying you need gold plated ethernet cables to connect your stereo components or you can hear distortion.
Re:Frames (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.100fps.com/how_many... [100fps.com]
Whatever floats your boat: I can personally see difference of 60fps to less, and I quite like 60fps.
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What's annoying is that none of these sites seem to give a straight answer to how many frames per second we can actually distinguish. Yes, even an extremely short flicker of light is detectable but can we notice the difference between a 60 fps and 250 fps video? Here's my proposal:
1. Get some *extremely high* fps footage, for example the Phantom Flex4K can do 1000 fps for 5 seconds.
2. Make interpolations that play at normal speed, like:
7 -> 1 frame for 142.8 fps
8 -> 1 frame for 125 fps
10 -> 1 frame
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Can I tell the difference between 60 and 250? Absolutely. Heck, I can tell the difference between 60 and 75 fps, and can identify a frame rate below 100 pretty readily if things onscreen are moving quickly. (...) When I was gaming regularly, I couldn't stand playing at less than 100 fps.
Games don't have natural motion blur, if I throw a ball in front of the camera it'll travel during the 1/24th second and leave a smear while a game rendered at 24 fps will have the ball jump in discrete steps like filmed with a strobe light. The easiest way to fix that is to render more frames so the steps become smaller and a better approximation to reality's infinitely smooth motion. What you're measuring isn't how important the frame rate is for the display, but how important the sampling speed is for th
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Context matters a lot here. When I see a good frame in a game, I am not moving so everything looks great. But that's for the sort of games I have. 30fps is definitely good enough for lots of things, in an MMO 15fps is probably good. However I guess for testosterone fueled shooter games that higher FPS makes a difference just because the view point is changing so rapidly.
Basically I can't see the problem with 15-20fps unless I take the mouse and jiggle it back and forth rapidly, which is something never
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Video games are among the most computationally intensive applications
This is a joke right? Simulating fluid dynamics, simulating weather patterns, finding large primes, factoring primes, etc. are all far more computationally intensive. And that isn't even close to an exhaustive list. Rendering a video game is kiddy stuff in comparison.
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Rendering a game is kiddy stuff...
--- until you are expected to believer a theatrical quality experience while running a game on hardware costing no more than $500 retail list.
Re: What? (Score:1)
Wait, a fucking theater? OMG are they really a thing? Holy shit, I'd love to go to a fucking theater, that would be awesome!
Where can I find one? Are the girls good looking?
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If it can be done on $500 consumer hardware it's not computationally intensive.
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This is a joke right? Simulating fluid dynamics, simulating weather patterns, finding large primes, factoring primes, etc. are all far more computationally intensive.
Errr... factoring primes is one of the least computationally intensive problems possible. The factors are always 1 and the number itself. I think you meant finding prime factors.
In any case you are being a bit pedantic. It is clear that the author was referring to computationally intensive retail software running on commonly available retail hardware. There is no mass-market for weather forecasting software or fluid dynamics simulators.
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Errr... factoring primes is one of the least computationally intensive problems possible. The factors are always 1 and the number itself. I think you meant finding prime factors.
I'm sure he means "factoring the PRODUCT OF large primes".
It's an easy slip to make. (I've done it myself. B-b )
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Video games are among the most computationally intensive applications
This is a joke right?
Barring being taken over and being used as part of a botnet for grinding out cryptocoins, the most computationally intensive program most people's computer will ever run will be a video game.
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yeah so how much does normal folk use their cpu/gpu time for that? they don't. furthermore, having latency on the results is expected in those.
but the games use all the resources available quite often, due to you wanting to run them at as high settings as the computer permits.
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A lot of the real-world tough stuff can apply to video games (but often doesn't because as you say, it's computationally hard to do realtime). However, some stuff like physics modelling did start to take off when it finally got adopted in games. Similarly, a lot of fluid dynamics/simulations are being looked at to improve game realism (which is useful for stuff from water flow to realistic body movement such as fat, breasts, or buttocks).
Instructive to see how far we have come (Score:2)
Pretty amazing but who stole all the colors? (Score:2)