Unreal 3 Engine

[oldsk00l]

well....more polygons doesn't mean better graphics.

That's why Doom3 is still king of the hill when it comes to graphics....

[Razor1]

Originally Posted by dpagan

thanks for info i guess i misunderstood, so how of many polygons does a scene usually consist of? examples D3 or HL2

Doom 3 used around 100k-150k

Half Life 2 around 100k

Far Cry 100-200k

Unreal 3 tech demo 400k, they say 400k to 1 mill which is very hard to believe at 20 fps. 400k is reasonable.

[jolle]

Originally Posted by oldsk00l

well....more polygons doesn't mean better graphics.

That's why Doom3 is still king of the hill when it comes to graphics....

Carmack called it "Smarter polygons instead of just more" or something like that..
Most games today are moving in that direction with Normal mapping, bumpmapping, Virtual displacement (parallax, offset etc) and such "surface emulating" techniques.
You can get alot more detail with them, oppsed to pure polygons, at the same performance cost.
ex the detail skinimperfections in Doom III faces, the downside being they dont do squat for the siloutte, which is plain to se on the bald heads on some humans in doom III.

[Cota]

I think the image quality would be so much better if doom3 models heads were more rounded. Some of them look too blocky.

That's one of the reasons HL2 are considered much better.

[Edge]

Doom 3's models are between 2,000 and 4,000 polygons each. Backgrounds vary, but I'd guess they peak at around about 20,000 (probably substantially less most of the time). So at most, maybe 30,000 polygons on screen at once in Doom 3. Half-life 2 a bit more, but still not by a huge amount. By comparision, Half-life 1 and Quake 3 used had around 3,000 polygons in a single scene.

Actually, it seems higher polygon counts are more prevalent in console games than PC games, partially due to less effects being used on them. For example, Ferrari F355 Challenge on the Dreamcast (a console using 5-year-old technology) had areas with over 50,000 polygons on the screen, and it ran at 60FPS. Of course, it only used basic textures and specularity maps for almost all of them, no fancy bump mapping, normal mapping, or advanced lighting effects, but it still looked pretty decent. At this point, more polygons aren't really a big deal since the camera is almost always far enough away from the characters and geometry that the extra smoothness isn't very noticable. Also with displacement mapping and offset mapping, you can simulate the effects of millions of polygons in a single surface. Just take a look at Humus's offset mapping demo: had the floor and walls been built strictly from polygons without using any mapping, it would've probably used well over a million polygons in the scene. But, thanks to the surfacing effects, it looked almost exactly the same except it only drew about 10 polygons.

Although there are some rough edges in Doom 3 that could've been smoothed out with more polygons, in-game it looks great but sometimes cutscenes zoom in far enough that you can see a lot of pointy edges on the characters.

[dpagan]

as of what i've seen so far in regards to the UE3, it doesn't seem as something you wouldn't be able to do with the doom3 engine, and i'm betting quake4 will show us more of what that engine is capable of (outdoor enviroments + structures) i bet it's going to rock (at least in the graphics department)

[jolle]

Originally Posted by dpagan

as of what i've seen so far in regards to the UE3, it doesn't seem as something you wouldn't be able to do with the doom3 engine, and i'm betting quake4 will show us more of what that engine is capable of (outdoor enviroments + structures) i bet it's going to rock (at least in the graphics department)

Well, its the same basic "philosophy" I guess..
UE3.0 is alot more flexible then the Doom III engine I think, it doesnt use a "unfied renderer" like Doom III, but instead it supports a wide array of shadowing methods, from simpler methods to demanding realtime softshadowing.

Its all listed on the UE3.0 site (link in my post above, site seems to be down atm, posting it again anyhow)
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html...ogy/ue30.shtml

But anyway, if you ported a UE3.0 scene into Doom III engine it should look fairly similar, you would loose the "bloom" and the HDR support, and the softshadowing.
It would prolly perform a bit worse in the D3 engine due to the Unfied renderer and the shadowing method it uses, dunno tho, that depends on how the method they used in the scene performs in contrast.
But the relativly highpoly scene in combo with the stencil realtimeshadows of the D3 engine would prolly be pretty taxing.

[dpagan]

now isn't the doom3 engine able to use dx9 effects, i mean i read they where actually using dx9 for there heathaze effect, so maybe bloom, HDR can also be used, either way i read this week that OPENGL 2.0 was being released soon so i guess many of these effect will be done using just the opengl API

[jolle]

Originally Posted by dpagan

now isn't the doom3 engine able to use dx9 effects, i mean i read they where actually using dx9 for there heathaze effect, so maybe bloom, HDR can also be used, either way i read this week that OPENGL 2.0 was being released soon so i guess many of these effect will be done using just the opengl API

Its a bit different under OpenGL as I understand it, the extentions used for the heathaze is only supported by DX9 class hardware like you say.
There are a few leftover CVARS concerning HDR, carmack said they dont do anything anymore and are leftovers from experimenting with HDR.
It could prolly be added tho, if anyone wanted to, but its not "HDR ready" out of the box, so to speak..

Carmack mentions OpenGL2.0 support here:
http://www.webdog.org/cgi-bin/finger...20020627230700
Dont know alot about it, dont think it would make that much difference without too much work on the engine..

Anyway, he is already working on a new engine that is baselined on DX9 hardware, which would be more on the line with UE3.0 (d3 was based on DX7 hardware with T&L and that sort IE GF256, then extended upwards to support DX8 hardware and to some extent DX9)
So I dont think they will put alot of effort into extending the D3 engine further, rather let other developers utilize it better with newer games targeting higher end hardware..

[Intel17]

Doom 3's Engine has DirectX9 level fragment program support. In an email from John Carmack, he told me that HDR is in the engine, but it's only for NV40, and basically in beta and it's not artist friendly.

I hate when people say the D3 engine is a DX7 engine...

[dpagan]

Originally Posted by Intel17

Doom 3's Engine has DirectX9 level fragment program support. In an email from John Carmack, he told me that HDR is in the engine, but it's only for NV40, and basically in beta and it's not artist friendly.

I hate when people say the D3 engine is a DX7 engine...

so...it can be implemented but it would be to much trouble as of now, anyhow the lighting in the game looks great as it is, i wouldn't mind seeing a screen of the game with HDR enabled tho, just to see how it looks

[jolle]

Originally Posted by Intel17

Doom 3's Engine has DirectX9 level fragment program support. In an email from John Carmack, he told me that HDR is in the engine, but it's only for NV40, and basically in beta and it's not artist friendly.

I hate when people say the D3 engine is a DX7 engine...

HDR doesnt work in Doom III, ever heard of anyone managed to enable it?
it was experimental and isnt present in a working form in Doom III.
Or you mean its "in the engine", but wont work in Doom III with the CVARS for it? cause THOSE dont do anything here..

And I never said D3 is a Dx7 engine.
Carmack started on the renderer based on the Gf256 functionality (T&L), and has extended it from there, in other words its "baselined" on DX7 level hardware, its the lowest it will run on, even tho it looses alot of its visuals.
Dx8 level is "full featured" without the heathaze (Dx9 stuff)

the new engine will be baselined on DX9 hardware, so it prolly wont run on DX8 hardware, but might still utilize functionality from DxNext (or WFG or what it ends up being called), depending on when its released I guess..

EDIT
hehe, found this little nugget, from april 29 2000, carmack demanding 64bit precision..
http://www.webdog.org/cgi-bin/finger...20000429013039

Once I set down and started writing new renderers targeted at GeForce level
performance, the precision issue has started to bite me personally. There
are quite a few times where I have gotten visible banding after a set of
passes, or have had to worry about ordering operations to avoid clamping.
There is nothing like actually dealing with problems that were mostly
theoretical before...

64 bit pixels. It is The Right Thing to do. Hardware vendors: don't you be
the company that is the last to make the transition.

EDIT again..
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14716

All of the r_sb* and r_hdr* cvars are for research code that wasn't included in the shipping build.