Final Fantasy demo pix and details erupt

Even though the Geforce 4 is quite an impressive part, the rendering that this card offers is still quite some way away from the image quality that we saw in the original Final Fantasy movie.

Movies like Shrek and Final Fantasy, that are more than just cartoons use very complex scenes with loads of polygons, vertices, and very high resolution textures don't need to be rendered in real time.

Shrek was rendered by 200 machines connected in one big rendering cluster and in the evenings when employees toddled off down the pub, there were 300 machines used to render all those complex scenes seen in original movie.

Even though cards like Geforce 4 TI 4600 are really powerful they still cannot match 300 machine clusters that render some scenes for quite some time while in real time graphic you expect to have at least 24 FPS to have fluent motion.

You can draw the conclusion that even while we were really thrilled to see Final Fantasy demo running in real time, its quality was still lagging from original rendered movie.

We learned that the demo version used 40 000 vertices for lady called AKI while the other scientist called SID was build from 49 000 vertices.

The rest of the scene used about 70 000 more vertices leaving this scene to a final 159 000 vertices when you put all this data together.

As we already said demo was running fluently and it was good enough to amaze me just like I was shocked when I saw nature test at 3Dmark 2001 back in March 2001 running on Geforce 3.

I must inform you that this demo uses just 10 per cent of original polygon count used in the original movie. The other fact is that the original movie was rendered at much higher resolution than 32 bit precision that you usually see in "real time" graphics or games. This leaves just 256 variations of the same colour pre primary channel while if you use 128 bit precision you could got much more. 128 bit color is about to become standard in hardware introduced as soon as this year. With 32 bit precision per colour you will be able to get as much as 16,7 million of variations of same color in RGB plus Alpha channel used for some effects.

Even so this is a very fancy looking demo, at lest for a real time its still not match for original movie. I would really be thrilled to see games of this complexity running on hardware soon.

I hope this clarifies things and here are the images that you get from Geforce 4 and the original one from the movie. µ