Nvidia Turf Effects

http://www.legitreviews.com/nvidia-turf-effects-performance-tom-clancys-ghost-recon-wildlands_192434

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLVa0NOFdwM

This is related to their work on hair, but is a good example of how the steadily increasing power of graphics cards is producing new kinds of graphics engines. If you check out the article, getting these kinds of detailed effects to work requires the beefiest cpu and gpu on the market today which means the effect will become more common within a few years. This game is an example of what is possible using a traditional rasterized engine of triangles, but represents a way to achieve similar effects to those of ray traced geometry. In fact, if the developers wanted they could already convert this game to real time ray traced geometry for playback on a Imagination powerVR gpu giving all that nice grass additional eye popping lighting effects that make its current ones look wimpy in comparison such as glass windows that look like real glass and realistic dew drops on the grass.

Both the grass effect and HBAO are related to the God rays and reflect the fact these kinds of number crunching routines can be done more efficiently using dedicated AI circuitry on the cpu such as using Intel's "Nervana" which is coming on the market for servers and consumer products, perhaps, next year. They are basically combining a more traditional cpu with a streamlined number cruncher that can handle big numbers faster and more efficiently allowing the cpu chip to do some routine tasks like ambient occlusion, hair effects, and this grass effect that might otherwise bog down the gpu. Having more options to do certain things on the cpu means video game designers can design their games to be played on more machines at different levels of graphic detail and it will probably take a good five to ten years for them to work out most of the basics of what it is possible to do using this kind of approach. Some game engines might leverage different assets to different degrees to focus on physics or, like this one, merely to enhance the environment and others might be designed for enhanced AI or whatever. However, ultimately, ray tracing is a much more intuitive way for programmers to design games and, in the future, they may be designing them in ray traced geometry and then making them backwards compatible with rasterized engines that can run on wimper computers.

If you stop and think about it, these cutting edge graphics which require a $3,000.oo computer to take full advantage of will run on a cellphone within five years.

 

If I wanted to look at grass...Wouldn't I just go to a park and look at grass?

The human mind - greatest virtual reality system in the known Universe.

 

That's why everyone tries to imitate the human mind without success. Even whether reality is virtual or not becomes a matter of the greater context of the greater truth, or what Socrates called the "memory of God" which none may look upon and remember in all its glory. Is it live or memorex? Space or time? Coming or going? Imitation they say is the highest form of flattery.