5.) Why Hardware Specs Don't Matter: Part 2

Euclideon Makes the World' Most Realistic Graphics

       What if I told you that hardware specs won't matter in the future to pull off state-of-the art graphics for next-gen videogames? I briefly touched on this technology in a Facebook Note I wrote back in January of 2013. Thanks to the new breakthrough in Point-cloud system data, it doesn't matter how advanced the hardware is. Most people thought it would take a supercomputer to render this, but it doesn't! That's because the models are not Polygon based like your traditional 3D models. They are based on points, like atoms. So this saves a lot of computing processing power. The scenes created in this video are just for demonstration. There is no telling what game companies like Epic Games or Crytek with their teams of artist and programmers could do if they had this technology.
     
       So why is this technology not in games yet? Originally, there were too many holes and gaps in these models and it was difficult to animate poin-cloud data. What if these game companies found a way to convert their models to point-cloud data in their game engines so that the models can still be animated and treated like traditional models almost? Well, now they can because the creators behind this technology figured out a way to animate it and fill all of the gaps. The graphics in the scenes in this video are running straight from terabyte hard drives. Believe it or not... the load times are completely abolished. This is laser scanned data which has been updated and compressed down to use little memory and then streamed from the hard drive. The impossible is now possible! With this technology, we can now probably digitize the real world. That's kind of a scary thought.

See more videos here: http://www.euclideon.com/media/

Their main website: http://www.euclideon.com/

       The false assumption this day in age is that you need great hardware in order to have amazing computer graphics. This video destroys that assumption. Also, I'd like to note that hardware simply runs the graphics; it doesn't necessarily create the content that the artists created themselves in the game. I have come across so many gamers that say things like, "They should re-make this game with Xbox One graphics". It doesn't make sense because its the game engine that handles that for the most part. The question is, "Can the hardware handle it?" So to re-make a game with graphics to show off the power of a next-gen console, the artists have to change the actual graphics content in the game themselves. In order to do this, they might increase the polygons in the 3d models, improve the lighting, add features like better shaders, normal-mapping, bump-mapping, and maybe even ray-tracing depending on the hardware specs. Unfortunately, this makes their games more and more dependent on hardware specs. Basically, in short and this will sound crazy: With this new point-cloud technology, a game like the Last of Us could run on Nintendo Wii! I have seen this technology run on the Wii first hand and I will admit... I was shocked. Its wild because the Nintendo Wii for example does not have hardware capable of running a game like the Last of Us. After I witnessed a tech demo from Euclideon running on the Wii first-hand, I realized hardware specs soon won't matter in order to play games with high-end graphics. The irony is that it does take advanced hardware to create the games LOL

Right now, its not really my main priority but I think game companies need to look into this so that their games are less dependent on hardware specs. Here are a list of reasons why:

• 1.) That means people won't have to buy expensive gaming PCs to pull off the level of graphics that they want. 

• 2.)That means, regardless of what console or game platform you own, it will be even harder to tell the difference visually. 

• 3.) That means game companies can run their high-end games on more platforms (even if the platform's hardware specs don't live up to the requirements of today's next-gen games). They will reach more people to play their games, thus creating a bigger audience and ushering in more money. I have seen this technology run on the Nintendo Wii first hand. The Nintendo Wii!! Wow!

For a more update version on this topic, please visit my other blog post here.

       There were some confusion later on Twitter about the tech demos I said were running on the Wii. Euclideon released some web demos of their technology which can be found here. All we simply did was stream it through the Nintendo Wii's web browser. With a fast internet connection, it ran pretty decent. Many people had issues with the web demos' visual quality because of latency and possibly low bandwidth. We basically waited until everything had fully loaded which took a while and later it ran pretty smooth. We've asked Euclideon for downloads instead. The reason is so that we could run the demos directly from the Nintendo Wii's hardware to avoid latency and bandwidth issues that comes with streaming. This wasn't too profound since its simply laser-scanned technology. These are just tech demos, not actual games.