Home Gaming Epic details the tech behind the Boy and his Kite

Epic details the tech behind the Boy and his Kite

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aboyandhiskite

If you haven’t seen Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 Boy and his Kite demo, you’re missing out on a glimpse of the future. The engine’s shaping up to be rather impressive stuff, and the demo shows us how the engine could be utilised to transform open-world gaming. Epic’s now detailed the tech that’s gone in to the demo.

“A Boy and His Kite” featured physically-based rendering, with a single GPU rendering 100 square miles of terrain. It’s complimented by ray-tranced distance field soft shadows, full scene HDR reflections, high quality motion blur and DOF, as well as distance field ambient occlusion.

In addition to that, the leaves and grass are all two-sided, with 15 million pieces of vegetation, plus phtometric sampling of real world data and dynamic global illumination from heightfields. Along with that you’ve got temporal anti-aliasing, procedural asset placement, subsurface scattering and 500 sculpted blendshapes.

It’s all just gobbledygook that elicits a response of “Damn!”

The single GPU running it, as you know, is Nvidia’s newest Titan X – which as it stands, is the undisputed king of desktop GPU’s. Nvidia officially launched the $1000 card yesterday, and it’s the most powerful card on the planet at the moment (we await news of AMD’s R9 390X with eager anticipation), pumping out performance equivalent to two of the company’s last gen, Kepler-based flagship cards.

The GM200 core on the GTX Titan X comes with 6 Graphics Processing Clusters, each of which consist of four SMM (Streaming Multiprocessors Units) which have 128 cores in each SMM block. The Titan X has all 24 SMM Units enabled which result in 3072 CUDA Cores, 192 Texture Mapping Units and 96 Raster operation units, 3MB L2 cache and has 6 64-bit memory controllers which result in a 384-bit wide memory interface.

And it does this. In real time, now annotated to tell you what tech is being employed.

Last Updated: March 18, 2015

33 Comments

  1. Graeme Selvan

    March 18, 2015 at 09:54

    HOLY HELL!

    Reply

  2. Guild

    March 18, 2015 at 10:00

    Must have it….

    Reply

  3. Chaos Lord Norm

    March 18, 2015 at 10:02

    I accept donations.

    Reply

    • Admiral Chief

      March 18, 2015 at 10:13

      *donates comment

      Reply

    • Hammersteyn

      March 18, 2015 at 10:14

      [Donates upvote and comment]

      Reply

      • Admiral Chief

        March 18, 2015 at 10:21

        Blerrie copycat

        😛

        Reply

  4. Pariah

    March 18, 2015 at 10:05

    That is Epic.

    Reply

  5. Hammersteyn

    March 18, 2015 at 10:09

    All this just so that we can have another generic FPS shooter…

    Reply

    • Admiral Chief

      March 18, 2015 at 10:12

      Yes, that is quite DOF

      XD

      Reply

  6. Admiral Chief

    March 18, 2015 at 10:09

    DOF you say?

    😛

    Reply

    • Pariah

      March 18, 2015 at 10:19

      There is no limit to the Depth of Fail here.

      Reply

  7. Avi

    March 18, 2015 at 10:11

    Cant begin to imagine the games that are going to be built on this engine
    Hoping Uncharted 4 is looking this way

    Reply

  8. Pieter Kruger

    March 18, 2015 at 10:19

    Unreal Engine 4 with DirectX 12 is the bees’ knees! ????

    Reply

    • Pariah

      March 18, 2015 at 10:20

      Trivia: “The Bee’s Knees” comes from “The be-all and end-all”.

      Reply

  9. DJSkippy

    March 18, 2015 at 10:23

    WOW, I thought CryEngine had it all but this is ….. yoh….

    Reply

  10. Ranting Raptor

    March 18, 2015 at 10:28

    That kite has serious issues

    Reply

  11. Chaos Lord Norm

    March 18, 2015 at 10:29

    Besides the quality of the graphics, that was a pleasant video to watch.

    Reply

  12. ElimiNathan

    March 18, 2015 at 11:05

    Funny thing is if you look at benchmarks, I could crossfire my R9 290 and have similar performance to the Titan Z, which would work out to R11 000 vs R49 000. (I checked the price of the Titan Z on landmarkpc.co.za)

    Reply

    • Jack

      March 18, 2015 at 11:22

      this video used the titanx not z

      Reply

    • Pariah

      March 18, 2015 at 12:00

      Yeah but that’s a dual GPU card. It’s just 2 Titan Blacks on one board, so it’s going to be moer expensive. The single Titan Black is R19k at most. So really, you need to compare apples to apples here…

      Let’s not forget how old that tech is. That’s like comparing a GTX 960 to an R7 270x (I don’t know AMD crap, don’t ask me for legit models, there are none. LOL.).

      Reply

      • ElimiNathan

        March 18, 2015 at 12:13

        I think you have completely missed my point. My card, an AMD R9 290 beats a Geforce Titan in benchmarks. 2 of my cards beat a Titan Z. A titan X is somewhere inbetween a Titan and a Titan Z. Either way, it might be the most powerful single GPU card but I can get WAAAAAAAAY more power for far less, and an R9 290 was released at the same time as a GTX 780, so its not really old tech

        Reply

        • Pariah

          March 18, 2015 at 12:18

          With 12gb’s of memory, and the power consumption which is less than your single 290? Just frames per second isn’t the way to get a full picture. Because remember, this can push those frames at 4K, with 12GB’s of memory to load 4k textures, in real time. Whereas an r9 290 will struggle. Even 2 of them in crossfire, because 4gb’s of memory. And using a LOT more power, and creating a LOT more heat (which means more cooling is needed, which means more money, more running cost, lower overall performance, etc.)

          The point is quite simple really, you’re not comparing apples to apples. EVERYONE knows that there are more sensible options than the Titan X. But this card isn’t aimed at the mainstream market.

          Also, the 780 IS old tech.

          Reply

          • ElimiNathan

            March 18, 2015 at 12:24

            R9 290 x 2 = 8gigs, I run 4k on one as it stands.

            But you are right in saying its not for mainstream market.

            I want to move over to Nvidia on my next upgrade build but wont be able to touch this

          • Pariah

            March 18, 2015 at 13:10

            The way crossfire and sli works is that you don’t add the two cards’ RAM together, you’re limited to the total of one card. ie: 4GB. Whichever the cards are alone.

            DX12 will allow for that to change, but if I’m not mistaken it’ll be up to developers to implement that into their games. So effectively, still only 4GB

          • ElimiNathan

            March 18, 2015 at 13:13

            For now, yes. I don’t like to dwindle on the past 😉

  13. Xcalibersa

    March 18, 2015 at 11:53

    Just a few more years for the tech price to go down

    Reply

  14. Pariah

    March 18, 2015 at 12:03

    Thanks to ElimiNathan’s comments below, the price for a Titan X is officially R19k in South Africa. R18.3k for the standard issue version.

    http://www.evetech.co.za/PC-Hardware/evga-geforce-gtx-titan-x-superclocked-1086.aspx

    Reply

  15. Joe Black

    March 18, 2015 at 13:15

    Yes, but the thing that makes the demo really impressive is the boy’s interaction with the terrain. Is that the engine’s doing or artistic frame by frame design on the model behavior.

    That is what I want for Christmas. Character models that can intelligently interact with terrain.

    Maybe a lot to ask, but for me that would be a quantum leap in realism. I mean I’m holding my thumbs here…

    Reply

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