'80s CGI will always have a place in my heart

"The AE86 of Mt. Akina (Hachi)" (theae86) 04/12/2019 at 17:33 • Filed to: None

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Crazy how this was probably done on megabytes of ram. 

facw > The AE86 of Mt. Akina (Hachi) 04/12/2019 at 18:01

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Yep, and not a lot of megabytes. Your typical desktop at that time was probably 512k to 1MB, tough I imagine this would have been done on powerful work station or server which might be better endowed. The good news is there’s no way it was done in realtime, so swapping to from disk a bunch wouldn’t ruin the render, even if it greatly increased the time required.

HammerheadFistpunch > The AE86 of Mt. Akina (Hachi) 04/12/2019 at 18:02

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So my neighbor growing up was Bob Ingebretsen . Going over to their house to see computer stuff was always stepping into the future for me.

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PS9 > The AE86 of Mt. Akina (Hachi) 04/12/2019 at 18:15

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Even crazier; Video cards have thousands of times more memory in VRAM than 80s era hard drives did, and some can now do real time ray tracing. That last one is something I thought I'd never see in my lifetime. 

facw > PS9 04/12/2019 at 19:15

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I mean raytracing doesn’t have to be super computationally expensive, so even before dedicated hardware, you could do it real time, it’s just a question of scene complexity, number of rays, and number of reflections/transmissions you can support. It just hasn’t been worth doing because the accelerated triangle rasterization/shader approach has always produced better output given the hardware constraints. We’ll see if that changes with the hardware raytracing support. I don’t think it will go anywhere if just Nvidia is doing it though, and especially when they are only doing it on high-end cards , it’s just a bit too niche. Rumor has it AMD is adding some support as well which should open things up a bit.

Ash78, voting early and often > The AE86 of Mt. Akina (Hachi) 04/12/2019 at 19:16

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Spielberg’s Amazing Stories intro at 0:09. That was my jam! Twilight Zone for 80s kids.

PS9 > facw 04/13/2019 at 00:08

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you could do it real time, it’s just a question of scene complexity, number of rays, and number of reflections/transmissions you can support.

Yeah you could, if you were okay with unacceptably simple scenes you couldn’t build an art asthetic around coupled with unacceptable quality given the prohibitive constraints.

This gives us a better idea of where we were versus now. Just one generation of difference reveals a 4x performance gulf between the old top tier 1080 ti, and it’s replacement. DLSS just widens the gulf even further. None of the non-ray tracing cards offer acceptable performance, and given that everything below the 1080 ti is approaching single digit frame rates, it’s fair to say real time gameplay would not be possible on the 9xx series and below GTX cards with ray tracing turned on.

If the only real time ray tracing we could do with previous generation hardware involed simple geometry, single digit framerates and constraints on our ray casting configuration so prohibitive as to make ray tracing almost useless to add, then we basically didn’t have it until now. Real time ray tracing is not useful unless it can enhance the environment of a game we are likely to play at rates of performanc e acceptable for real time rendering.