So, some Australians are saying they can make almost any computer run things with more then 100 times the graphics of Crisys 2So, basicaly, polygons (which is what all games use now) are fast but rather ugly unless you have tons of them, and they occupy a fair bit of memory. Voxels are a different kind of graphics engine that doesn't use polygons but rather little atoms to construct objects. This creates absurdly realistic graphics, but they're so detailed that animating them is not practical.
So, IIRC, these people claim that they made a whole new different type of graphical engine. It isn't
pixelsray tracing, or polygons, and isn't exactly voxels.
Here is a quote from their site, explain whats its supposed to be:How does it work?
If you have a background in the industry you know the above pictures are impossible. A computer can’t have unlimited power and it can’t process unlimited point cloud data because every time you process a point it must take up some processor time. But I assure you, it's real and it all works.
Unlimited Detail's method is very different to any 3D method that has been invented so far. The three current systems used in 3D graphics are ray tracing polygons and point clouds/voxels, they all have strengths and weaknesses. Polygons run fast but have poor geometry, ray-tracing and voxels have perfect geometry but run very slowly.
Unlimited Detail is a fourth system, which is more like a search algorithm than a 3D engine. It is best explained like this: if you had a word document and you went to the search tool and typed in a word like 'money' the search tool quickly searches for every place that word appeared in the document. Google and Bing are also search engines that go looking for things very quickly. Unlimited Detail is basically a point cloud search algorithm. We can build enormous worlds with huge numbers of points, then compress them down to be very small. The Unlimited Detail engine works out which direction the camera is facing and then searches the data to find only the points it needs to put on the screen it doesn’t touch any unneeded points, all it wants is 1024*768 (if that is our resolution) points, one for each pixel of the screen. It has a few tricky things to work out, like: what objects are closest to the camera, what objects cover each other, how big should an object be as it gets further back. But all of this is done by a new sort of method that we call "mass connected processing". Mass connected processing is where we have a way of processing masses of data at the same time and then applying the small changes to each part at the end.
The result is a perfect pure bug free 3D engine that gives Unlimited Geometry running super fast, and it's all done in software.
While this does sound awesome, I'm very skeptical, and I don't have any sort of background in this area. If it works, great, but this is one of the things that sound just too good to be true. I'm afraid it may be a trick to attract investors.