Toy Story in Real Time ... how Crytek let us down...

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In the beginning of 2010 I made some calculations to predict when we will see toy story level graphics and wrote in a forum ... but my calculation went horribly wrong when Crytek let us down

To prove I have not copied I have added a reply in the forum
verifying I Orpheus am Anil Mahmud

I also posted this thing in vr-zone at that time

http://www.fudzilla.com/for...

Here is the post :

""

When NVIDIA launched the GeForce 2 in 2000, Jen-Hsun Huang said it was a "major step" towards achieving "Pixar-level animation" in real-time only to be criticized by Pixar's Tom Duff.

"These guys just have no idea what goes into `Pixar-level animation.' (That's not quite fair, their engineers do, they come and visit all the time. But their managers and marketing monkeys haven't a clue, or possibly just think that you don't.)

`Pixar-level animation' runs about 8 hundred thousand times slower than real-time on our renderfarm cpus. (I'm guessing. There's about 1000 cpus in the renderfarm and I guess we could produce all the frames in TS2 in about 50 days of renderfarm time. That comes to 1.2 million cpu hours for a 1.5 hour movie. That lags real time by a factor of 800,000.)

Do you really believe that their toy is a million times faster than one of the cpus on our Ultra Sparc servers? What's the chance that we wouldn't put one of these babies on every desk in the building? They cost a couple of hundred bucks, right? Why hasn't NVIDIA tried to give us a carton of these things? -- think of the publicity milage they could get out of it!

Don't forget that the scene descriptions of TS2 frames average between 500MB and 1GB. The data rate required to read the data in real time is at least 96Gb/sec. Think your AGP port can do that? Think again. 96 Gb/sec means that if they clock data in at 250 MHz, they need a bus 384 bits wide. NBL!

At Moore's Law-like rates (a factor of 10 in 5 years), even if the hardware they have today is 80 times more powerful than what we use now, it will take them 20 years before they can do
the frames we do today in real time. And 20 years from now, Pixar won't be even remotely interested in TS2-level images, and I'll be retired, sitting on the front porch and picking my banjo, laughing at the same press release, recycled by NVIDIA's heirs and assigns. "

Many did not find this response a very warm one and started blogging for example , this one is from a brother :

http://industrialarithmetic...

Now I ventured to do some calculations. You can always correct me if I am wrong as I am no expert in the computer industry.

Machines used to render Toy Story :
87 dual-processor and 30 quad-processor 100-MHz SPARCstation 20s
Total number of processors = 294

According to :

http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/ben...

SPARCstation 20 (single processor) had SunOS 5.4 installed and used a HyperSPARC @100 MHz with 27.5066 MFLOPS

Theoretical maximum performance of the setup used by PIXAR

294 * 27.5066 = 8086.94 MFLOPS

Movie was rendered at 1526x922 pixels using Stochastic Anti-Aliasing
Scan-line rendering used, shadow mapping for shadows ( no ray tracing )

Movie Length ~ 75 minutes
Number of rendered frames = 110064
Movie frame rate ~ 25 frames per second
Rendering time = 46 days
Total data sent to renderer = 34 Terabytes

Factor by which more power is needed for this to be real time

46*24*60 (rendering time)/ 75 (movie length) = 66240 = 883.2

So required computational power = 883.2 * 8086.94 MFLOPS = ~ 7.14 TFLOPS

This is without considering all the network bottlenecks.

Theoretical Performance of Gforce 480GTX ~ 1.5 TFLOPS

(not considering ATI solution because it is less programmable)

If 4 cards are placed in quad SLI (EVGA SLI classified motherboard though this motherboard can handle 7 cards )

4*1.5 = 6 TFLOPS

Now hardware rendering is much faster than software rendering and there is less of network bottleneck here.

Quick facts

Per frame data of Toy Story = 34*1024*1024(total data sent to renderer)/ 110064 = 323 MB

Per frane data of Crysis ~ 200 MB

Per frame data of Crysis 2 = :-)

Polygon per frame of Toy Story = 5-6 Millions

Polygon per frame of Crysis ~ 1.7 Millions and Nanosuit = 67000

Polygon in the Nanosuit of Crysis 2 ~ 1 million

Texture Streaming can now allow for extremely detailed textures

Example : RAGE from Id Soft

Something similar is probably used in Crysis 2

Global Illumination is used in Crysis 2 which is probably better than the lighting system in Toy Story
Only lacking feature is probably Stochastic Anti - Aliasing

""

Some of the data like 1 million polygon in the nanosuit was circulating on the web at that time

Now I was expecting Metro Last Light / BF3 to do the thing but those GTA Mods ..... puts a smile on my face :-)

I have found another link providing performance data of the sun workstations

http://home.iae.nl/users/mh...

Back to the Origins: Rayman

When you hear 'Rayman' you may think about his never-ending escapades with rabbits, who are equally as deformed as our titular character; Rayman. If you thought that, then you don't even know Rayman. He may not be as recognizable as Sonic or Mario, but Rayman certainly has become somewhat of an icon in the gaming world.

Now me and Rayman go way back. I'm talking about how he used to teach me such basic things like Mathematics and English on the sheer prowess of Windows 3.1! And, fortunately for me, there was even more that Rayman could help me learn! Branching out to explain the French language through his 'educational adventures'. If you were to get an answer wrong you were punished by watching Rayman die and flinching in shock because it happens so fast! Though my sarcasm may not be obvious to some, the origins of Rayman do not rest in the hands of 'Maths & English with Rayman!'. So don't worry, you wont have to solve those quadratic equations to beat the next boss.

While on the outside, Rayman appears to be a failing temporary teacher, fundamentally, on the inside, Rayman actually proved to be a pretty successful 90's platformer too! In his debut, the 2D classic, 'Rayman' managed to give me fond memories and nostalgia for the Playstation One title I once owned. In 2D, I could understand Rayman, his world was flat and in that existence his impossible body shape became possible. Overall, the game looked pretty good and hasn't aged as much as those nasty 3D games at all. Since then, Rayman has branched into extra dimensions and had multiple spin-off's. But nothing has come close to the classic gameplay of the original... not until the announcement of Rayman: Origins, of course.

Now granted, this is old news, and this game appears to be a long time coming. However, with Gamescom 2011 just around the corner, there might well be an announcement and something well looking forward to. In contrast to the way Rayman has evolved with Rayman 2 & 3, a step back to the original is most welcome. With inclusion of multiplayer modes and UbiArt Framework technology, this episodic title could return Rayman to it's former glory!

It seems that Rayman belongs in 2D, as do many other platformers. And with the artistic direction that Ubisoft has taken, Rayman: Origins may well be a great homage to the original Rayman. Hopefully, this title will be hitting the online marketplaces soon!