stevemulligan says:

Impressive, and so is every other piece of unverifiable tech.

What hardware are they going to use? Will it run on OpenGL compatible hardware using point-sprites to draw the atoms, or are we going to need a new video card.

Also, there was a lot of texture data in those demo scenes, are we going to need a new type of motherboard with a new bus?

Michael_gr says:

Here’s the catch:
they claim that there’s a lot of repetition because they’re a software company, not a game company, and they don’t have a lot of graphics resources. All well and good – but there’s this thing called instancing, which to put it simply means that drawing repetitive elements is much faster than drawing unique elements. Since normal games and virtual environments tend to not have such a high degree of repetition, the actual performance might be significantly lower.

There’s also the aspect of object creation and animation which they don’t really bother discussing – I assume normal polygonal models are converted but current animation techniques won’t transfer that well to a voxel based system. And then there’s disk space and memory allocation. What is the memory footprint of one of their models, let alone a complete environment? It might be too big to fit in memory (again, instancing means you only keep a single element, but render it hundreds of times on the screen – which doesn’t happen that often outside demos).

There might be something to this, but currently I’m taking it with a grain of salt.

Cursor_ says:

But here is the real rub.

They can make the graphic better, they can tweak the shadows, lighting, all that.

But unless the game is good. Unless it is something that immerses the player and unless it can be something that casual to hardcore player can get into, it doesn’t mean a thing.

Nice looking is fine. Being able to lose yourself takes storytelling. And with the current crop of writers putting out rehashed 80s rubbish, endless sequels and translated foreign shows, I don’t hold much hope for them.

So far the majority of it remains vacuous content that wastes time and money. Fuck FX, I need some Shakespearean level story.

Make Me Believe Your Story.

Cursor_

Uncle Patso says:

New game and graphics software is always written for _next_ year’s hardware, or even the year after that. This will probably require at least 2 SLI video cards, if not 4, dual-core or 4-core or higher CPU, 2-4GB DDR4 RAM, etc.

Skeptic says:

I can’t help thinking that this will just be another atom bomb.

pedro says:

#9 Unlike you. You are all hype and you blow.

The0ne says:

big failed PR imo. Nothing but talk.

Drive By Poster says:

All that potential detail is probably moot. Those high end games are expen$$$ive as hell due to all the heavily mentioned detail. And now this guy is saying game companies can now easily blow ten times as much money on visual realism when they can hardly afford to model the current level of detail.

f_w says:

Man, he shows a work in progress, and people complain when it dose not look ready to use.
And 10 year old graphics card?
For real?
Who in their right mind would think a 10 year old card would work good in even todays new graphic intensive games?
Everything moves forward, 10 year old computer anything is WAY out of date.
Heck a 5 year old computer is showing its age.
And usually if you are not a gamer, or have those needs, you do not even get the high end stuff when you visit the store, witch influence its life sustainability..
When this ships(if it dose) the new computers may handle it just fine.
And perhaps the little older gaming rigs.
But who knows, perhaps they have solved the scaling thing and have stuff that lower the load on the pc enough on lower end systems.
Speculating is really pointless at this time, perhaps fun, but really pointless as the thing is not even done, and we do not know enough on how it will work when it is.