Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering

[Shoonay]

Saw this a while ago, and still the most important question hasn't been answered: on what specs did this rendering run on? Assuming it is an actual rendering, not a pre-rendered animation.
They mentioned this kind of of technology is used "in medicine and science". Well, there is a HUGE gap between commonly available hardware for us simple people, and commercial high-end stuff used by pros, in both CPU's and GPU's specs. And everything else, actually.
For us, the CPU limit is something around 8-cores, 24GBs of memory. For commercial use, it's way above 32-cores and 256GB of memory.
Dunno about the GPU's, I only know back in 2001 my friend borrowed some pro 3D Mark tutorial book mentioning some GPU card we never heard about back then, that had specs we could buy in 2008 cards.

[Harrison]

As we all know, technology exists years before it filters down to an affordable level that allows it to be released as a consumer product.

Look at current TV technology for proof of this. As shown at the recent German IFA trade show, displays of ultra thin panels, glasses free 3D and 4x HDTV called QFHD Quad Full High Definition (3840×2160) which is technology that has been around for a long time (the BBC have performed demo broadcasts of this format for years now for trade shows), and there is also UHDTV or 4320p for its resolution of 7,680 × 4,320 and was invented around 2003 and first shown in 2005, but not cost effective enough for consumer release for an estimated 20 years at the time. It will be mind blowing when it does eventually arrive though as it has the same resolution as iMAX.

And the same is very true of consumer computer hardware. Business server hardware always sees new technology long before consumers purely because they can afford the hardware for the benefits it will provide against its expense. Something consumers can't do. I fully expect that the GPU technology we now see released for gaming graphics cards has been around for years in other areas of industry. Especially military and medical.

Look at GPS as another great example. The military had GPS units in their vehicles years before most of us even know what they were.

It always comes down to production cost for the consumer market. Until it can come down to a level affordable to buy it won't see commercial exposure. And even the QFHD TVs I mentioned, and the new Toshiba glasses free 3D TVs are over £8K to buy even now. Although when the first HDTVs were released they were the same price, and we can now see how much these have fallen in price in the last couple of years. You can now buy a pretty decent 32-40" HDTV for £400, and can even get a pretty nice budget 32" Full HDTV for under £200.

[Bloodwych]

As mentioned above, this looks awesome but if you watch the demo it has a lot of repeat geometry, so only a small number of unique models are rendered in the atoms and then repeated over and over.

There is no outline on the limitations of the engine or specs required. It would be really nice to move away from the tessellation war currently going on between AMD and nVidia - Crysis 2 and its extreme tessellation is silly, as it's only designed to make AMD look bad and not to improve the visuals for gamers.

That's why I'm still using a GTX 260 216 black and DX9. All this tesselation DX11 stuff is a killer on FPS with little difference noticed whilst gaming - especially with all the console ports!

[Harrison]

The console ports are definitely limited PC games development to a certain extent. I do however like the fact pretty much all recent (last 2+ years) PC games detect and have proper Xbox 360 controller support... that has to be the one big benefit from cross platform development.