Unlimited Detail technology – Is it the real deal?

[OmarFW]

About a year ago Euclideon, a small graphical technology company based in Brisbane, Australia presented a demonstration for their new rendering technology they refer to as ‘Unlimited Detail’. What they proposed was a method they had discovered to render an unlimited amount of data on a screen in real-time without using polygons.

This of course was met with skepticism as our industry has always been ruled by the polygon and the limitations it has presented since the first 3d game ever came out. A processor can only put out so many polygons at a time. The more powerful the processor the more polygons it can display obviously, but even the most powerful cards on the market right now have a limit and cannot render the kind of detail that Euclideon was suggesting. Needless to say, if what they promised is actually possible then games of the future would look about 500x better than they do now. Modern games already look pretty impressive but when it comes down to it you can still notice the tricks and techniques that developers put into their engines to save on polygons and increase performance- much at the cost of detail in ways you wouldn’t typically notice while actually gaming.

While some people don’t care about the graphics on that kind of level and no one should ever really prioritize graphics ahead of gameplay, the fact still remains that graphical capabilities in modern gaming are improving much too slowly. This is mostly because of cooling limitations. Fans can only do so much and the faster you make a GPU the harder it is too cool. The release of DirectX 11 proved an impressive attempt at sustaining the longevity of modern gaming engines but it really failed to fix the real problem visually.

After one year of purposefully staying out of the media spotlight and seemingly disappearing they have come back with another demonstration to show just how far their technology has advanced.

The first time I had watched this I was rather unfamiliar with the different kinds of graphics technologies out there and needless to say I was very impressed and excited that this kind of technology was being developed. Why? Because I had figured that after years of development using the same technology continuously (namely DirectX and OpenGL) someone would have finally developed some kind of graphical breakthrough by now. While the CryEngine and Frostbite engine are definitely impressive, they are hardly breakthroughs. They look good simply because of overlays and filters that have been developed alongside greater texture size capabilities. Those are simply band-aids to the graphics problem though, not cures. The core problem lays in the fact that modern rendering is based on polygons which is an aging technology. Euclideon seemed to present the kind of technology I had been waiting to pop up and I initially believed it to be true.

Not long after the video was released the creator of Minecraft, Markus Persson aka Notch put up a blog making some very good points against Euclideon’s claims and made a counter-claim that it was all a scam.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

Essentially his point was that this is not new technology, simply voxel renders and they only created this demonstration to try and get funding. They had not created anything new or revolutionary like they had claimed to.

“In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.”

“Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation…”

“They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.”

This seemed like a legitimate argument against the demonstration since nowhere do you ever see any animation. There is also plenty of duplicated content multiplied many times to form the shape of the island. While this is definitely far more impressive looking than any voxel engine I’ve ever seen, the evidence against it was very strong.

This blog was followed up by an interview done by HardOCP TV with Bruce Dell the CEO of Euclideon to give a more detailed and interactive demonstration of the technology.

First off, Euclideon was the recipient of about $2 Million in grants when they came together so the idea that they are scammers going after grant money is somewhat out of question. I am content enough with what I see in this interview to give the technology another chance rather than be a skeptic but only time will tell if this is genuine so I’m certainly not going to endorse it as such until then.

There are just some things I find fishy about their presentation of the technology. There are many things they could do to present it in a way that deters people from being skeptical about it. The brand ‘Unlimited Detail’ sounds a bit arrogant as if the technology expects recognition in a ‘too good to be true’ way which is exactly what I would expect from a scam. They could have gone with a different name while also highlighting the supposed ‘unlimited detail’ it’s capable of. I also don’t understand why they aren’t more involved with the media. They say they are going to leave the spotlight for another period of time while they continue developing the technology. Why not release development videos demonstrating their progress in the meantime? Why are they so secretive? They seem to present things in a manner akin to saying “ooo look it’s fueled by magic!” That is not something people can get behind. When it comes to not appearing like sleazy salesman, they are not doing a very good job. If they want people to believe their claims they should show people how the technology works.

I do definitely hope this technology is real but I am not going to support it without reasonable evidence to. Putting something we gamers have wanted for a while now in front of our noses only to be scamming everyone by slapping a new label on something old would be akin to a kick in the nuts. So is their technology a hoax? I would not say no but until a game is released that utilizes it I would not say yes either.

All in all, this kind of technology is coming eventually. Even if it doesn’t come within the next few years from Euclideon, it will come. We need to move on from the polygon if we want to progress in gaming graphically.

-Jesse Leigh aka OmarFW via GamerMC