Hacker News Reader

Comment by WithinReason | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye polygons, hello neural networks?

More like "run this low-quality polygon and raytracing renderer at 320x240 @20 fps, upscale to 4k120 with acceptable quality".

I think meshes and textures can be replaced by intelligently shifting, raytraced billions of platonic solids

http://zeroprecedent.com/platonic

Why not billions of triangles? Unreal is betting on Nanite because triangles have so many nice properties in addition to having the whole art pipeline already set up.

(I could not get the URL to load. Maybe HN hugged it)

Triangles have no volume and no diffraction occurs inside them as it does with Platonic solids. The idea is that real-time raytracing will allow complex variations and interactions of "Platonic dust particles" and the rays bouncing and refracting between and in them. It would be a more expressive "clay" for the AI to tinker with than triangles - the orientation/color/transparency changes of each solid will be able to elicit more visual effects than doing it with flat triangles.I got banned from Eleuther discord today The One#3740

This person just invented a very handwavey GAN

Effective representation changes everything

Like hashtables

I’ve seen the GTA demo.

Are there any commercial games currently doing this?

Neural rendering? I doubt it. Check out deep learning super sampling though (DLSS) from NVIDIA, which has to be plumbed into the game itself to enable.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/technologies/dlss/

Not sure yet.

This is probably going to fight virtual geometry tech like Unreal's Nanite, which is still using triangles but using clever automated LoD and GPGPU rasterization so that rendering e.g. 20 million pixel-sized triangles is fast and looks just as good as rendering a trillion triangles. (normally very small or thin triangles are a pathological case for hardware rasterizers)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com