Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sigmoid10 815 days ago
>Whether this will end up being better than really well optimized polygon based systems like Nanite+photogrammetry is also an open question

I think this is pretty much settled unless we encounter any fundamental new theory roadblocks on the path of scaling ML compute. Polygon based systems like Nanite took 40+ years to develop. With Moore's law finally out of the way and Huang's law replacing it for ML, hardware development is no longer the issue. Neural visual computing today is where polygons where in the 80s. I have no doubt that it will revolutionize the industry, if only because it is so much easier to work with for artists and designers in principle. As a near-term intermediate we will probably see a lot of polygon renderers with neural generated stuff inbetween, like DLSS or just artificially generated models/textures. But this stuff we have today is like the Wright brother's first flight compared to the moon landing. I think in 40 years we'll have comprehensive real time neural rendering engines. Possibly even rendering output directly to your visual cortex, if medical science can keep up.
1 comments
WithinReason 815 days ago
It's easier to just turn NeRFs/splats into polygons for faster rendering.
link
sigmoid10 815 days ago
That's only true today. And it's quite difficult for artists by comparison. I don't think people will bother with the complexities of polygon based graphics once they no longer have to.
link
WithinReason 814 days ago
Rasterisation will always be faster, it's mathematically simpler.
link
sigmoid10 804 days ago
Not really. Look at how many calculations a single pixel needs in modern PBR pipelines just from shaders. And we're not even talking about the actual scene logic. A super-realistic recreation of reality will probably need a kind of learned, streaming compression that neural networks are naturally suited for.
link
WithinReason 804 days ago
neural networks will be used on top of polygon based models
link
sigmoid10 798 days ago
They already are. But the future will probably not look like this if the current trend continues. It's just not efficient enough when you look at the whole design process.
link