I am the only one who practices magic: I practice magic in the city

Chapter 496: Games have frame rates, but does reality have frame rates? (5737)

Mirage 1.0! ?
Self-developed search engine!

Everyone at the scene was in an uproar.

Wait, Fang Yu didn’t deny that this was a real machine demonstration. Instead, he said that this was based on Yuzu Technology’s self-developed engine - Mirage 1.0. Could it be that this was really achieved on a mobile phone?
Not to mention the processing power of a mobile phone, even a GTX1080 dual-channel crossfire PC, or the PS4Pro just announced by Sony, even with peripherals, cannot achieve this effect!
And this was achieved on a mobile phone?!
Or a self-developed engine?

"Of course, the underlying architecture of the video after the worldview introduction was not ready yet, so it was generated with the help of AI. However, the game screens in the previous 'Shadow' part were indeed developed using the 'Mirage Engine'."

As soon as Fang Yu finished speaking, everyone at the scene couldn't help but change their expression.

It’s really a real machine demonstration!
Fuck! This is outrageous!
Even if it wasn't AR and not combined with the real scene, a considerable portion of the image just now would be difficult for the mobile phone GPU to render.

The A10 released by Apple last month is not good, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 821 is even worse!
If combined with real-time computing of AR real scenes, desktop-level products will be out of the question!

Fang Yu knew what other people's expressions were without even looking, and he smiled slightly.

"Some people may question how the 'Mirage Engine' can achieve real-time modeling and rendering on a lightweight computing platform like a mobile phone, and combine it with the real scene with almost no delay."

Fang Yu took a stylus and wrote and drew on the keynote displayed on the big screen.

"I will not go into detail about the specific technical issues today, I will just talk about the principles."

"First, the cloud architecture of the Mirage Engine actually carries the most important rendering calculations. What is returned to the mobile phone is only the 'status' data after rendering. The amount of this data is actually very small, only about 3MB per second."

Cloud computing? Only 3MB of data transfer per second? Ten years ago, Half-Life wasn't enough to render a wall, right?

“It’s not what everyone understands.”

Hearing some puzzled discussions below, Fang Yu shook his head: "We do not push the frame stream to the mobile phone, but transmit the scene status, material mapping information, lighting solution, etc. of each frame back using a customized protocol, and this part of the protocol data only occupies 3MB/s."

Is this true or false? Zhu Yifei's lips moved slightly, and before he could ask further, he heard Fang Yu continue:
"Secondly, the reason why these 'status' data can be so concise is because of the 'environmental probe array' technology unique to 'Mirage'."

Environmental probe array? Hearing this new term, everyone stared at Fang Yu intently.

"The 'environmental probe array' is not a physical probe, but a pure software virtual concept developed by us based on an AI vision system, which completes this part of the calculation on the mobile terminal."

"By calling the GPU's repeated resource binding, thousands of virtual probes are nailed into the visual environment within 2.5 seconds. After these probes are nailed in, the cloud-rendered materials will be solidified on these probes, so that no matter how the camera moves, there will be no delay in the delamination effect. This alone saves more than 90% of AR repeated rendering resources."

Everyone seemed to understand what was said. Although they were game developers, only a handful of them could comprehend how the underlying technology was achieved.

"Third, it is the most important feature of Mirage Engine - 'simulated reality refresh'. It is this feature that enables Mirage Engine to achieve the 3D image rendering effect we just saw under the GPU computing power of mobile terminals."

Having said that, Fang Yu paused, looked around, and saw that everyone had a confused look on their faces.

Simulated reality refresh? What does it mean? Floating refresh rate? VVR is not a new technology, but mobile GPUs don't have it yet, right?

Fang Yu turned a page of the keynote.

“Simulated display refresh is not about adjusting the refresh rate, but an algorithm that can save 4% of rendering resources compared to Unreal Engine 95 in most environments. Mirage can naturally invest more computing power into better rendering effects.”

Save 95% of rendering resources in daily scenes! ?
No algorithm can do this!
Zhu Yifei's forehead and cheeks were red, and he raised his hand with frowned features:

"Mr. Fang, even if the environment probe array you just mentioned can reduce the repeated rendering of each frame of materials, as long as it is a moving picture, there are still a lot of materials that need to be rendered in real time in each frame."

"In your first demonstration just now, the frame rate on the screen was 38-60 frames. If this effect is rendered in real time, even with the theoretical value of GTX1080, it will be very slow, and the maximum frame rate will be only a dozen or so."

"Even the worst game engines can effectively utilize the GPU's core execution units by more than 30%. Unreal 4 is probably between 45% and 60%, so there is not much room for improvement. It's not that I don't believe it, but it saves 95% of rendering resources, breaking the theoretical limit."

When Fang Yu saw there was someone to support the actor, his eyes lit up.

That’s great, Boss Tiger. The road is now wider.

Fang Yu nodded, his lips curled up slightly: "You are right. If Unreal's real-time rendering method is used, it should not be able to run on both mobile and desktop terminals. However, Boss Hu, I have a question."

Zhu Yifei looked sincere and said, "You go ahead."

Fang Yu raised her eyelids slightly and looked at Zhu Yifei: "Games have frame rates, but does reality have frame rates?"

Zhu Yifei was stunned, looking as if he didn't understand: "What?"

Fang Yu pointed out the window and said, "The game is animated by the frame rate changing every second. Whether it is a change in the environment or a change in the action, it is equivalent to the computer drawing dozens or even hundreds of pictures per second, so that we can see with our naked eyes that this virtual world is moving."

“But is this how reality works?”

Zhu Yifei's body trembled slightly, as if he understood something, but he didn't seem to react completely: "You mean..."

Fang Yu smiled slightly: "I said, reality has no frame rate, only continuous state changes."

"Why does rendering have to be done in frames?"

Not rendering in frames? Then what?
Seeing the confused expressions of everyone at the scene, including Zhu Yifei, Fang Yu shook his head and said, "Have you forgotten what Yuzi Technology does?"

“We are in the AI ​​business.”

After hearing these words, some people who were quick to react at the scene had their faces completely changed.

Fang Yu looked around at everyone and raised his eyebrows: "The real world has no frame rate, so rendering should not be based on discrete frames, but should be based on continuous prediction of 'changing trends'."

"People don't reconstruct their posture every millisecond, and cloth doesn't recalculate its next position every second."

“All change is continuous.”

"So the Mirage Engine doesn't calculate the state of the scene in the old way of 60 frames per second."

"We have trained hundreds of thousands of models of materials, limbs, light and environmental reactions for mirages, and can directly 'imagine' the reasonable next state based on the existing information."

“We built a set of multimodal state mapping models that integrate materials, dynamics, and lighting, and can predict the next state based on behavioral logic in real time.”

"For example, if a person is running, a traditional rendering engine needs to calculate the skeleton, skin, material, lighting, synthesis, and frame output."

"The mirage engine calculates the model - 'What will his next pose be?' And then renders this series of poses."

"Instead of dropping frame rate, we make frame rate a display interface rather than rendering decision logic."

“You see 60 frames, but the actual core rendering path only triggers reconstruction at the two-frame level, and the rest are continuous state frames generated by AI.”

"Moreover, a large part of the resource consumption of these two frames is also shared by the cloud server. After all, many physical characteristics of mobile GPU chips are not supported."

“It is not a single graphics module, but an AI engine hub that integrates perception, prediction, content generation, and resource scheduling.”

"Yes, that's right. Mirage Engine is essentially a big model, a big model that works together with the cloud and mobile or desktop. I just said that it reduces the computing power consumption of mobile terminals by 95%, which is actually a very conservative estimate."

"This part of the algorithm gave us a headache for a long time, but we finally came up with it. Although we are still not satisfied with the final result, it is still usable. There should be a lot of room for improvement."

Fang Yu shook his head, looking dissatisfied.

"Everyone has a pad in front of them. There is no password. When you open it, there is only one app inside, which is the demo of "Taishhuang: Mountain and Sea Realm"."

“You can take a look at it. Frankly speaking, besides the fact that I am not satisfied with the engine effects, I am even more dissatisfied with the art level of this demo and the design of the game mechanism, numerical values, gameplay, and rhythm planning.”

"There is no way. AI's creativity in this area cannot be compared with that of humans."

“I hope everyone can work together to help me fix the shortcomings of this demo within this week.”

"Thank you all in advance."

With a loud bang, everyone at the scene was shocked.

Fang Yu clasped his hands together and bowed his head modestly. When he looked up again, he saw that everyone had already picked up their Pads impatiently, and soon they were shouting at the screen.

The otaku who loves playing games is so impolite, no wonder his gold coins are easily lost!
Fang Yu curled his lips.

No one in the room paid any attention to his expression. They stared at the screen with their teeth bared and their faces flushed, but they were talking fiercely with their colleagues and friends. Fuck! Was the demonstration just now real?!
Why didn't you just let us try it out?
Eh? This pet is so interactive! ?
Are pets also AI?

rely on rely on rely on!
The gaming industry is really going to change!!!

If this game is really made, it will be incomparable to the 3A console games!
Older, middle-aged and younger otakus and fujoshis continuously issued exclamation marks representing low IQ.

The game content of the Demo is still very simple. It is just a novice guide with a short plot, starting with collecting a pet, followed by a teaching battle, and that's it.

After opening the pad and concentrating on experiencing the demo twice, Wei Ao raised his head and let out a long breath, only to see Zhu Yifei also looking up in a trance.

Epic is done.

The two looked at each other and understood the meaning from each other's eyes, but they didn't know how they understood it.

No one had expected that, originally they came here just to do some hard work for a mysterious client for Yu Dan's sake, but here they witnessed with their own eyes news that would change... no, it should be said that it would reshape the entire industry!

The birth of AI games does not surprise them too much. With the current speed of AI development, everyone predicts that true AI games will be born within three to five years.

But who would have thought that the first thing to be born was not an AI game, but an AI game engine! ?

The first to die is not the game company, but the fucking engine company?
Wei Ao looked at Sui Yi with pity, as he was communicating with the big rat he had just caught with great interest, and thought to himself that you should just be content, in the art industry, at least high-end artists will not be unemployed for the time being.

Look at Epic, it could die suddenly without any warning.

What really determines the quality of a game's graphics is not the graphics card, but the game engine and the development team's ability to apply the engine.

The engine determines whether the game has real-time global illumination, automatic occlusion culling, whether texture grading supports virtual streaming loading, and even whether multiple rendering domains can be dynamically merged in one frame...

These are the real dividing lines in picture quality.

When we say a game’s graphics are good or bad, it essentially refers to the difference in the project development team’s ability to master, develop, and tune the game engine.

Both use Unreal Engine 3, but The Legend of Sword and Fairy 6 is a mess. They had to change the engine midway through production, and the graphics are not even as good as Gears of War from ten years ago.

Of course, there are also differences in financial resources.

A wealthy team can buy higher quality materials, and the pictures will naturally be better.

Judging from the trailer, this game is obviously running on mobile phones.

At present, it is good enough to use Unity in the mobile game field. But let alone Unity, even if the Unreal Engine 4, which is still the most powerful engine in the industry, is updated in a hurry, it is impossible to achieve such a picture effect!

No, it's not just Unreal 4. Last year, a set of Unreal 5 development parameters were leaked online. According to those leaked parameters, Unreal 5 cannot compare to the game engine being demonstrated on the screen now!

Moreover, there are very few engines on the market that can support AR. Unity can only rely on external SDK to compete with Vuforia's image recognition. Unreal is even worse. Although it has strong rendering, there are not many plug-ins that support AR.

In fact, it was not just Zhu Yifei. Some main programmers who were good at engine architecture and artists who were sensitive to rendering had already realized this problem when the promotional video was played.

——Let’s not talk about the physical collision calculation methods and spatial modeling technologies that we just didn’t understand. Let’s just talk about the picture. Currently, there is no graphics engine that can support this level of AR perception, real-time spatial modeling and high-quality rendering.

The graphics engine is only part of the game engine. An applicable game engine must at least have a physics engine, audio engine, input system, scene management, script system, UI system, animation system, network module, editor toolbox...

The bosses of the independent game development teams who came today are almost all in their thirties. They entered the industry because they loved games when they were young.

They are very familiar with the development history of game engines, and they understand how difficult it is to redevelop a game engine in today's era of "high-end Unreal and mobile Unity".

Not to mention the game engine that Fang Yu claimed "has performance far superior to Unreal 4 in all aspects", even if we find a game engine that can match Unreal's performance, no company can do it at present.

Because Unreal Engine is not only a 3D rendering framework, but also an entire ecosystem built around content production. Its development tool chain and material content far exceed any other engine.

Just as CUDA's ecological advantages ensure NVIDIA's dominant position in computing cards, Unreal 4 is the most powerful game engine of this era, without a doubt.

Unity has seized the mobile and 2D ecological niches with its lightweight features, but it is still unlikely to pose a substantial threat to Unreal in the foreseeable future.

It is generally recognized in the industry that in this era, the industry ecosystem has solidified and dominance has been formed. It is almost impossible for a stronger game engine company than Epic to emerge. The only one that can surpass Unreal Engine 4 may be Unreal Engine 5.

The game engine developed with the birth of 3D games and was originally called a 3D engine.

In the 2D game era, there was no concept of game engines. At that time, making games basically meant writing code from scratch. If the code from previous games could be used, then it would be used. If it couldn’t be used, it didn’t matter. It didn’t take much time to write a new one.

比如二十二年前的轩辕剑2，一共33MB的容量，压缩后只有12MB，安装时需要11张1.44MB容量的3.5寸软盘。

After removing art, MIDI music and sound effect resources, the actual code part of Xuan-Yuan Sword 2 is only about 1-2MB, and the total code volume is no more than lines.

Only large companies like Ren Tianguo and Sierra, which were already industry leaders at the time, had some functional module packaging tools in their development departments.

It was not until 3 years ago that ID developed the world's first 3D FPS game, Return to Legion D, that the engine + content development paradigm gradually took shape.

A year later, ID developed a groundbreaking FPS game in the history of games - DOOM (Doom) based on John Carmack's 3D engine, and licensed the DOOM engine to other companies through paid licensing. Only then was the complete concept of the game engine officially established.

Moreover, in the following two or three years, ID developed Quake and Quake II based on this.

The 3D engine of the Quake series was once the most popular 3D engine before the birth of Unreal Engine and dominated an era.

Many 3D games used to have 3Dfx Voodoo and Quake II or III logos printed on the CD cover to prove that they supported 3Dfx's Voodoo graphics card and used the Quake game engine as a gimmick to attract players. (Note 1)

Until Epic's Unreal Engine came out.

In fact, Unreal was also originally a game. The overall performance of the first generation of Unreal Engine was not better than Quake III of the same period. Although it had better color and rendering effects, its polygon capability was far inferior to the Quake engine.

In addition, Unreal's optimization was not as good as Quake III at the time, bugs emerged one after another, the development tools were not mature, and the physical engine's modeling problem was extremely serious.

However, Unreal has gained favor from more game developers after Epic announced open licensing.

Because it looks good and is cheap.

Although Unreal's technology is not more powerful than Quake III, it has more saturated colors, epoch-making lighting and shadow and translucent rendering effects, and a more varied scene system... In a word, when resources are limited, Unreal tends to look good, while Quake tends to be practical.

In addition, the licensing cost of Unreal is much lower than that of Quake. Although the direct licensing price of Quake is lower than that of Unreal, the price does not include the editor and also requires sales rebates.

The most important thing is that Quake's developer ID is very arrogant. Epic was able to assign dedicated technicians to provide customer service for Unreal Engine. The customer submitted a reproduction case request for support. When he received a reply, not only did he get a detailed answer to his question, but he also fixed the bugs he found.

In comparison, ID's Quake has no support at all. If you finally get in touch with it, it might be John Carmack who answers the call, and then you'll be scolded by him.

John Carmack of ID has a typical programmer's mindset, believing that technology comes first and everything else is bullshit.

If someone asks him for authorization and pays money, he will send the source code to you. Whether you can understand it or not is your own business. If you can't use it, it only shows that you are an inexperienced person.

He was right, saying that I supported open source and didn't want to charge money, but the company insisted on charging me, and it had nothing to do with me.

In the end, beauty defeated practicality, business defeated technology, and service defeated arrogance.

In the Unreal 1 era, the two sides were still fighting back and forth, but in the Unreal 2 era, ID was basically defeated. By the time Unreal 3 was released, Epic had basically dominated the field of high-end 3D engines.

After the release of Unreal Engine 3 two years ago, Epic has become even more prosperous. In the entire industry, unless there is no money, as long as there is money, Epic's Unreal Engine will be the first choice for engine when making D games.

Not only games, in the two years since the release of Unreal Engine 4, it has also begun to make efforts in many fields such as film and television production, industrial R&D simulation, education and training, digital interaction, etc., and even the construction industry has not been spared. A considerable number of BIM visualization projects and smart city projects use the Unreal Engine.

But now, every developer who is trying out the "Taihuang: Mountain and Sea Realm" demo will not believe that Epic has any chance of survival in the face of such an absolute generation gap.

The seemingly indestructible line of defense that Epic built with development tools and material libraries in the past now looks so ridiculous.

Exactly the same way as when Y-sou destroyed Chihiro!
Wei Ao glanced at Fang Yu who was surrounded by other developers, and suddenly remembered the giant pillar rising from the bottom of the sea at the end of the second promotional video.

Improve the gameplay?
Wei Ao's eyes flashed, and he opened the Demo development document attached to the Pad and studied it carefully.

The technology is indeed shocking, and the times have indeed been changed, but as I said before, whether a game is fun or not, and whether it can keep people playing it, these are not enough!

Just improve one demo?
Are you underestimating me?

(End of this chapter)