Unigine's Newest Benchmark Features Huge, Open-Space Expanses 87
jones_supa writes "Unigine announced a new GPU benchmark known as Valley Benchmark. From the same developers who created Heaven Benchmark, the Valley Benchmark is a non-synthetic benchmark that is powered by the Unigine Engine, a real-time 3D engine that supports the latest rendering features. The Valley Benchmark includes massive area of 64 square kilometers of very detailed terrain that includes forest, mountains, green expanses, rocky slopes and flowers. The area can be freely explored by means of walking or flying. All major operating systems are supported."
Skyrim (Score:3, Interesting)
All they have to do is rename it The Elder Scrolls VI and they have themselves a finished game.
beautiful! here is most of the techniques used.. (Score:5, Interesting)
-Impostors: For the groups of trees far away
-Vertex Program: For the sway of the trees, probably with per vertex amount of strength
-PSSM: For the shadows
-Godrays: For the sunrays through the trees
-HDR+Bloom with luminance bleeding: For the lighting and skybox
-Instanced Particles: For the clouds
I sure am forgetting some of them, but I think this demo, with huge amounts of instancing, is mainly designed to stress the vertex pipeline of modern videocard.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Why the obsession with faking a physical camera? (Score:5, Interesting)
Very nice. But I'm really curious: why do video sims have this obsession with pretending to be shot on a physical camera (e.g. rain drops on the "lens", lens flare when looking at the sun)?
I understand it's an aesthetic but it comes over as insecurity: "hey I bet you couldn't tell this wasn't a real camera in a real world". I think sim designers should have more confidence and get over this 'trying to prove we're as good as the real world by simulating failings in cameras'. I think there's some really nice work and they should concentrate on improving their presentation of world rather than trying to reverse engineer the failings of old cameras.
Rain drops on the lens from video shot on real cameras is really annoying. Don't spend energy trying to simulate it, or lens flare. Spend your time improving your new format, do cool stuff the real film makers can't do and take advantage that you're not bound by their limitations. Please don't work on a virtual camera operator's hand cleaning your virtual lens with a virtual disposable tissue when it rains hard....
Not just about detail & scale: realistic geo/b (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing that impresses me the most is the way that whoever put it together actually knows some geology and biology. The trees, other plants, and rocks are realistically placed. I admit it's kind of geeky, but as a geologist it always bothers me when game designers think any old "random pile of rocks" or "randomly bumpy cliff surface" corresponds to the way geological materials behave in the real world. Same for the shape of mountainsides. They are not randomly steep, planar slopes. Most of them have a graceful exponential kind of curvature. There are similar issues for the distribution of real plants and trees.
If the whole point of a game is to immerse you in an alternate reality, but everything in the "natural" world looks (to the experienced eye) like the building equivalent of walking through a funhouse, it kind of spoils the effect. These people are meticulously observant of nature and actually know what they are doing! Kudos.