Since the advent of 3D gaming, game developers have been using polygons to build 3D models and environments. In the beginning this was a very useful and simple way to create games but now, this technology that is over 30 years old, is outdated and needs to be replaced.
What are polygons?
In simple terms, a polygon is any 2 dimensional shape, Triangles squares, pentagons and so on.
To make a 3D sphere in game, a combination of multiple squares, rectangles and triangles are used. A simple low resolution will have to have a minimum of 6 faces like you would see in old fottball console games. Now however, that same sphere can consist of upward of a million faces.
So why are polygons outdated?
Modern games now are so powerful that a polygon face can be so small, it can in some games be smaller than a pixel on an 8k monitor, that's 33'177'600.... over 33 million pixels. Games can now run at upwards of 500 million polygons at any given time. This in turn makes the game look good, but ultimately pointless as there are more faces than pixels.
The other disadvantage to this is, if you have 1 polygon, you use up some Graphics processing and CPU power, as well as use up some memory. If you have 2 polygons, that usage doubles, 4 it doubles again and so on. This has resulted in technology such as graphics cards and processor's to advance at a very fast rate.
Processing power isn't necessarily a bad thing. It has its uses in servers that have to process mountains of data, at home when recording your desktop, recording music, compressing files faster and audio and video rendering. But when it comes to processing games, modern tech is pushed to the limit.
(Euclideon Hyper realistic PCD tech)
But what if there was another way?
I have mentioned Euclideon Unlimited a couple of times on my blog describing their holographic technology, but their gaming technology re-writes the rule book on game development.
They use Point Cloud Data (PCD's), this is basically a cloud of organised atoms. Instead of using polygons they use simple coloured dots/atoms. So that sphere that was upwards of a million polygons that used up a ton of graphic power, with PCD's, that sphere could now be a solid object, and not hollow like with polygons, and instead of a million faces, it can now be upwards of a Quadrillion PCD's but only use a fraction of the processing power.
The benefits are, much higher resolution and no loss in resolution if you zoom in as far as you want.
We talked before on how polygons use power. Well with PCD's if you have 1 it uses a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny amount of power. If you have 2, 10, 100, 1000, 1 million ext, PCD's, you are still using the same amount of power. So a game level can be the size of a country, but still have super realistic details in a single grain of sand, all this and it will work on a mid range Graphics card and processor.
I know it sounds too good to be true, but go and visit their site and you tube to learn more.
http://www.euclideon.com/
So why aren't games using this technology?
PCD tech has existed since 2010, Euclideon made a 1km map containing a million PCD's per square inch to demo to the world, but game developers, magazines and critics said this tech was a scam, only the chaps behind Cry-Engine looked at the tech in a positive way.
So quietly behind closed doors have been perfecting the tech, creating animations, developing there own games for their Holoverse and more.
But game developers still look down at this tech and brush it off. Why I don't know.
If this technology was to take hold and game developers worked with Euclideon instead of discrediting them, GPU developers such as Nvidia and AMD would loose out on large amounts of revenue. They rely on polygon based gaming to force people into upgrading to better and better cards. Instead of people buying 5 year old cards with a fraction of the power for much less, knowing they can play a future copy of GTA World using PCD's and only needing a mediocre GPU. This would benefit game developers as they would sell a lot more copies but ultimately shit for GPU makers.
So in my opinion we have about 5 years of improvements left in polygon based gaming before it plateau's, and the amount of detail we see will be restricted by the number of pixels we see.
I just have 1 thing to say to all the game developers...''Get of your fucking arse and stop using 30 year old technology that is now outdated and start using PCD instead and give us Hyper Realistic graphics that you attempt to give us with this shit you use... dick-tards''
Thank you for reading.
Stu @TechMojo
Images...
http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/sgrais/mass_and_void.htm
http://www.euclideon.com/
http://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/gaming/more-realistic-gaming-textures-on-the-way/35002961/
https://kotaku.com/controversial-next-gen-graphics-tech-still-looks-too-go-1638927642
https://www.autodesk.com/industry/media-entertainment/game-design-and-development