...render a full, umm Pixar-quality (insert technical term here) frame in realtime. Just kinda curious (read: bored) about the power it would take. Assume its a single-CPU system and that the video card would only display the frame(s). Take your pick of 32/64-bit processing. I say 15-20 GHz CPU 8 GB of RAM Worst thread ever...

get rid of lighting / shadowing and present day top-of-the-line computers could do it... though they probably used radiosity... so you''re going to need much more than 15-20 ghz

Sorry...this was meant for the lounge. Doh...

Renderman - the in-house developed software Pixar uses, supposedly subdivides each surface until it is a single pixel in size before rendering it (which sounds like it could be raytraceing basied) and considering that a full size movie frame of film is render to something like 4,280 X 2,400 resolution at 24 frames per second (do some searching for film SFX 3D rendering and film stock standards)....equals to something like 250 million polygons per second (a bit over 10 million per frame...at that resolution and at 24-bit color (standard film resolution color depth) thats about 30MB per frame...not counting Z-buffer and texture storage space)...

Ain''t happening soon...


Also what you see onscreen even in full CG Pixar films isn''t the direct output from the rendering software...rather it is a composit of a number of seperate renders (done by people with the job title of ''compositers'' layering them together)...this is because even on state of the art computers, a typical scene contains far to much data to be processed at once...so every shot is broken down into smaller size bites to be placed together later on.

Didn''t someone try to make a Myst game that''s rendered in realtime? Realmyst, or something. Did that ever happen, and did it suck?

quote: Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
Didn''t someone try to make a Myst game that''s rendered in realtime? Realmyst, or something. Did that ever happen, and did it suck?

Yes, it came out a while back. The 3D engine was decent but definitely not prerendered quality and not nearly as good looking as the better looking FPS games out there. Google for realMyst reviews, looks like the game did suck.