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Comment by swerner | Hacker News Reader

> But if the consumer can't tell the difference, does it matter?

The consumer gets used to it. The CG effects in Toy Story 1 look dated, and if you were to watch the Incredibles and the Incredibles 2 back to back, you would also notice immediately. Or compare the movie "Gravity" to "Babylon 5".

Plus I've not even mentioned hair, fur and volumetrics. A staple in pretty much any feature film FX, they were completely absent in the real time ray tracing demos. Hair and fur are commonly not ray traced as triangles but use custom intersection routines. Those are an extra layer of complexity on top. I don't know yet how Nvidia's own API for the RTX card looks like, but Microsoft DXR and Apple's Metal ray tracing both are restricted to triangle geometry only.

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>The consumer gets used to it.

This. You could do 100x more polygon and Ray Tracing, but consumer knows it is still CG.

I often wonder what will happen next? Once the economy of scale runs out for shrinking transistors. We have 7nm, 5nm and 3nm, and may be 450mm Wafers that leads to 2nm. We may only have 16x more transistor density improvements, and it seems 16x performance I still isn't enough for CG production.

Will OTOY's RNDR fix this by just through more compute at it?

I did watch Incredibles and Incredibles 2 nearly back to back, and did not notice any difference.

I do remember Zoolandia a striking in terms of effects though.

Look at the hair in the scene where they're in the ocean in Incredibles 1, and... pretty much any comparable scene in 2. The hair in 1 looks almost like plastic; in the sequel (or, even better, Moana), the wet hair looks much more lifelike.

For reference here’s a comparison video: https://youtu.be/WzNIyoMmjQ4

Wow. I haven't seen the sequel yet (unfortunately), but the differences is incredibly striking.

Thank you! I didn't watch #2 yet (I think that in Switzerland they'll start showing it only in October) but when watching the comparison I tend to like more the old/#1 version. Maybe because it looks more "plastic"/"synthetic" and therefore "cartoonish"??? Not sure... .

I read Zoolandia as Zoolander, and was really confused trying to figure out the special effects there!

blue steel took 10 days to render

In DXR, you can specify a custom intersection shader, thus it's not only limited to triangles.

Thanks, I was wrong then.

Np. All this marketing show is quite elaborate and it's hard to get true answers. Thanks for that top level comment by the way, this whole thread is crazy with speculation and misunderstanding.

This effect gives interesting perspective on pre CGI movies. You see how movie makers conveyed emotions, effect without very limited toolset and built great movies without rubbing the visual organ constantly.

I find a lot of movies today are falling in the Lucas trap: too much CGI (cost reign supreme I guess). It's a bad soil for movies...

Just compare "South Park" to "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within". CGI can't replace a good script.

I dunno. I still get goose bumps thinking about and watching the protagonist's hair swing realistically in the opening scenes of the FF movie. It was an awesome accomplishment for its time.

FF:TSW was more than 'look CGI' though, it was a failed movie, but there was a great deal of beauty in the landscape, characters etc. Epic was known for aesthetics mastery.

Toy Story 1 still had a budget of 30 million and a box office of 370 million, in 1995 dollars.

Lets skip past the discipline and lets focus on the consequences. What are the consequences here?

Why is Nvidia's new chip potentially failing product market fit?

Who mentioned failure?

I'm merely explaining why and how Nvidia can show 5 rays/pixel @ 25pfs while we're at the same time budgeting several hours per frame for state of the art production rendering. Sure, more and better hardware will help film rendering. It always has.

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