This video describes a different way to think about computer graphics:

In the traditional approach to computer graphics implemented by all major graphics cards today, the foundation is polygons. Every object in the scene is divided into a set of hundreds or thousands of flat polygones, which are then painted to make them look realistic. The graphics card is doing billions of calculations to decide how those polygons should be angled and shaded based on the position of the player and the lighting in the scene.

What Unlimited Detail Technology is proposing is a very different way to do it:

Unlimited Detail is a software algorithm that gives unlimited geometry. When we say “unlimited geometry” we really do mean it. It really is Unlimited, Infinite, endless power, for 3D graphics.

Specifically:

Unlimited Details 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 cloud/voxels, they all have strengths and weaknesses. Polygons runs fast but has poor geometry, Ray-trace 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 Yahoo 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.

If all of this is true, and if it is all done in software rather than a hardware graphics card, then we should expect to see this technology exploding in the very near future. Some game manufacturer will take a chance on it, create a game with stunning detail that blows everyone away, and then the industry will follow because it has no choice. If it is not true, you will never hear about Unlimited Detail again.

More info:
- How Ray Tracing Works
- Ray tracing in video games
- How Graphics Cards Work

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