Last Starfighter Blu-Ray - Cray X-MP graphics?

[fibrewire]

Recently obtained The Last Starfighter on Blu-Ray, looks incredible! TLF is sold by B&C as an unfinished product, a development

by Atari was produced but never sold (unfinished), and of course - Star Raiders II

 

Can the average home computers of today produce movie-quality CGI on par with The Last Starfighter? I wonder what the minimum requirement would be for an Arcade style remake.

 

[Albert]

Our computers today can easily exceed the CGI visuals of The Last Starfighter.

 

..Al

[fibrewire]

I think the original CGI was WAAYYYY overdone because the Blu-Ray looks as good as any PS3 game i've seen (minus the obvious textures of course), we're talking tons of polygons and crystal clear resolution.

 

EDIT: The original CGI averaged 250,000 polygons at any time!!! And the resolution was 3000x5000 36-bit pixels!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter#Production

 

I'd have to say no, the average computer can't

But in all fairness maybe a PS3 remake in 30 fps 1080p is warranted.

[spookt]

Love that film (cheesy as it is). There's a great feature on the Collectors Edition DVD about how the graphics were done which I really enjoyed too.

[ls650]

I dunno. The last time I saw this movie a couple of years ago, I thought the graphics were really showing their age, and rather 'quaint' looking....

[Albert]

I think the original CGI was WAAYYYY overdone because the Blu-Ray looks as good as any PS3 game i've seen (minus the obvious textures of course), we're talking tons of polygons.

 

EDIT: The original was average 250,000 polygons at any time!!! And the resolution was 3000x5000 36-bit pixels!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter#Production

 

I'd have to say no, the average computer can't

But in all fairness maybe a PS3 remake in 30 fps 1080p is warranted.

I believe you are grossly underestimating the power of today's graphic processors, which can render hundreds of millions polygons per second (higher end cards boast over a billion polygons a second). And the graphics in The Last Starfighter were mostly Gouraud shaded polygons, very simple compared to the more advanced capabilities available to today's most basic video cards. Again, a $100 video card would have no problems rendering any of the CGI in The Last Starfighter in real time.

 

..Al

[fibrewire]

You got me

 

I was really impressed with the 3000x5000 resolution for the time.

[+AtariNerd]

I had thought they had used full ray-tracing in TLS, but I suppose at that resolution, at the time, it would have been too intense a process... I suspect it might have still been a good work-out for a more modern desk-top processor trying to do full-pass ray-tracing in real-time of that many polys without use of any of voxels.or the GPU. Even modern GPU's like NVidia's CUDA architecture can't make use the massive memories needed for today's modern graphics and physics-intense films.. Render farms are still primarily a CPU-based entity.

Edited April 19, 2011 by AtariNerd

[Albert]

Even modern GPU's like NVidia's CUDA can't use the massive memories needed for today's modern graphics and physics-intense films..

That's true, but we're talking about a 27 year old movie (man, do I feel old). I wouldn't expect a modern day computer to be able to render any modern CGI-heavy films (like Avatar) in anything even approaching real-time.

 

..Al

[jaybird3rd]

I don't remember the particulars, but if you watch the documentary, you'll hear the filmmakers talk about how they had to scale down the quality of the graphics in order to get them done on time. That's why many of the computer-generated landscapes (such as the long shots of the Starfighter Base on Rylos) are kept very dark, and why the interior of the asteroid caves (where the Gunstar hides, just before the climactic battle scene) look a little like melted ice cream. If they could have afforded the longer render times, the effects could have been better even with the technology they had at the time. I'm sure they could be easily replicated with the graphics hardware available to us now. Whether it could be done in real-time or not, I don't know.

[+save2600]

Remember Babylon 5 and Seaquest? Early to mid 90's Amiga Toaster, Flyer, Lightwave technology right there

Edited April 19, 2011 by save2600

[+AtariNerd]

Well, if we assume it's primarily Gouraud shading, it can easily be rasterized without any important accuracy loss. Current high-end gaming cards can push nearly a billion triangles a second...

 

(need to replace a key...grrr)

Edited April 19, 2011 by AtariNerd

[Kjmann]

 

Can the average home computers of today produce movie-quality CGI on par with The Last Starfighter? I wonder what the minimum requirement would be for an Arcade style remake.

 

 

 

http://www.roguesynapse.com/games/last_starfighter.php

[emkay]

Well, if we assume it's primarily Gouraud shading, it can easily be rasterized without any important accuracy loss. Current high-end gaming cards can push nearly a billion triangles a second...

 

(need to replace a key...grrr)

 

 

I don't see a "home PC solution" that is able to create this. Even the newest setup & game shows corners in circles.

 

While in the movie everythig is "round" where it belongs to, you see the triangles in every PC game.

Since those rasterizers exist, the games look like mashups and not like "one scene".

 

 

 

No further comment

 

http://software.intel.com/sites/billboard/article-archive/ray-tracing/

[JamesD]

Let's see... from what I remember of the movie the graphics may have been very high resolution but they were pretty simple for the space ships.

The physics weren't accurate... they were more of a hand manipulated imitation physics rather than calculated ones.

 

The latest Unreal engine being demo'd does close to photo real imagery in real time with multiple GPUs. That's way better quality than The Last Star Fighter used. Yes, it's lower resolution but I don't think any monitors support the resolution used in the movie.

Unreal Engine

[emkay]

Let's see... from what I remember of the movie the graphics may have been very high resolution but they were pretty simple for the space ships.

The physics weren't accurate... they were more of a hand manipulated imitation physics rather than calculated ones.

 

 

Yeah, you have seen a Shipbattle in space for real , to have a comparision ?

What's really disturbing, as always in those "Space Movies" ... there is a "up and down" , no movement from all directions.

 

 

The latest Unreal engine being demo'd does close to photo real imagery in real time with multiple GPUs. That's way better quality than The Last Star Fighter used. Yes, it's lower resolution but I don't think any monitors support the resolution used in the movie.

Unreal Engine

 

 

Yeah. PC graphics go worse and worse. I still hope PCs will get soon fast enough for real Raytracing incl. vectorized graphics....

Edited April 19, 2011 by emkay

[Rybags]

When you're talking movies, the rendering rate doesn't matter, other than the addition to production time, and the fact you can't do "dress rehersal" previews in full definition.

 

So you can't really do a direct comparison to a home PC doing realtime rendering for a game or demo.

 

A home PC could render something like a Babylon 5 or Pixar movie scene in software and achieve a pixel-exact same result as the gear the producers used - it might take 100 times longer, but the end experience could be made the same.

[emkay]

I think the original CGI was WAAYYYY overdone because the Blu-Ray looks as good as any PS3 game i've seen (minus the obvious textures of course), we're talking tons of polygons and crystal clear resolution.

 

EDIT: The original CGI averaged 250,000 polygons at any time!!! And the resolution was 3000x5000 36-bit pixels!!!

http://en.wikipedia....hter#Production

 

I'd have to say no, the average computer can't

But in all fairness maybe a PS3 remake in 30 fps 1080p is warranted.

 

 

Well, you'd need "a million" triangels to draw a circle, but you'd need only one polygon to draw a circle. It depends on the shape of the polygon. A triangle has not much possibilites to change it's shape

[emkay]

When you're talking movies, the rendering rate doesn't matter, other than the addition to production time, and the fact you can't do "dress rehersal" previews in full definition.

 

So you can't really do a direct comparison to a home PC doing realtime rendering for a game or demo.

 

A home PC could render something like a Babylon 5 or Pixar movie scene in software and achieve a pixel-exact same result as the gear the producers used - it might take 100 times longer, but the end experience could be made the same.

 

 

That's true. But the thinking "PC of today can easily outdo this" should really been handled more carefull

[Rybags]

Hey, even an Atari could do it, provided enough storage.

 

Sure, it'd probably take 3 months or more just for a single frame, but the movie would get finished eventually.

[+AtariNerd]

Was just reviewing the film..funny how our preconceived notions affect our perceptions..There are a lot more cylinders and spheroid shapes than I remember. My recollection was of primarily geometric shapes with angular lines. Memories of the original TRON might have distorted it..it's definitely been awhile.

[roland p]

I found a cool website about the history of cgi: http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/lesson6.html

[spookt]

The interesting point about TLSF was IIRC they couldn't do previews. They didn't have graphics terminals that could display the renders so they ran the renders and the output was onto some kind of film printer. If they were wrong they had to start the render again with the corrections.

 

I agree that it shows it's age and I guess my kids would think "so what" if they watched it, but I remember how spectacular it looked at the time. Also I think it's somehow fitting that a film whose major premise is based around a video game has graphics that look a lot like they come from the same video game.

 

Always wanted to be "called up" when I was a kid

Edited April 19, 2011 by spookt

[carmel_andrews]

It's a shame they didn't have advanced CGI stuff when Lucas was doing his orig. star war's trilogy, it would have probably saved him a bit of money with making all those models and animation etc

[roland p]

It's a shame they didn't have advanced CGI stuff when Lucas was doing his orig. star war's trilogy, it would have probably saved him a bit of money with making all those models and animation etc

It's a shame he used cgi for the prequals