Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so the challenge is how to simplify every component of the rendering, the geometry, the lighting, and so on, down to real-time techniques. They're efficient. They capture a realistic view of what's around you. And so when an object is up close to you, you want to render it with a lot more polygons than when it's far away.
But one of the cool principles of mathematics is the Nyquist sampling theorem. It says if you're trying to reconstruct a signal, there's a limit to the amount of data you need to bother capturing. If you want to render a texture at a certain resolution, then you never need more than twice the pixels in the texture that you have on the screen. And that's called the Nyquist limit.
One of the challenges of computer graphics is given the need to render objects at extreme close-up distances and extreme faraway distances. You always want to be able to generate the right amount of geometry so that you have enough to be indistinguishable from reality, but not any more than necessary.
And with geometry, the idea is that if you render two triangles per pixel, you should get an image that is indistinguishable from reality. thousands of triangles per pixel. If you render less than two triangles per pixel, you're going to start to see visible artifacts of the loss. And GPUs have this amazing hardware in a lot of different pipelines, but it's all very fixed function.
There's pixel shader hardware, there's geometry processing hardware, and then there's triangle rasterization hardware. One of the limits of GPUs is that the triangle rasterizers are built for pretty large triangles. If you're building a triangle or rendering a triangle with 10 pixels, that's pretty efficient. But if you're building or rendering a triangle with one pixel, it's very inefficient.
So one of the breakthroughs Brian made was to design an entire pipeline for avoiding the rasterization hardware in the GPU and just going straight to pixels and calculating what should be done with that pixel as a result of some ray tracing and geometry intersection calculations done in a pixel shader.
So instead of using the triangle pipeline, we're just using pixel pipeline and getting a better result.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. But there's a lot of challenges like that. It turns out it's a lot easier to render one frame that looks perfect than it is to render a series of frames in motion that look perfect. A lot of the problems with the earlier algorithms that aspired to do this sort of thing was popping.
You'd be running some number of triangles for a while, and then you'd switch to a different number of triangles, and you'd see a visible transition, and the screen would look like it got shaken up. It's a disturbing artifact that distracts you from the game.
And so one of the magical trade-offs of Nanite was how to avoid all of the visible transitions and get them down to a point where, though they exist statistically, they're not really perceptible to a person looking at it.
Yeah, Unreal Engine is a big bundle of code and tools, a huge software package that provides all the functions you need to build any sort of a 3D graphics application. Game developers use it to make games, and that's the predominant use, but it's also used in Hollywood film and television production to create 3D scenery in real time for production sets, to do pre-visualization.
It's used by car makers to visualize their cars before they're
constructed or manufactured um it's used by architects to preview buildings before they're made and industrial designers of all sorts and it provides you know the all the 3d simulation features you need both for creating highly realistic 3d graphics but also physics and interactions between objects and making things happen like you might see in the real world um
And it supports a huge variety of styles, from Pixar-stylized movies to cel-shading to photorealism. And it can be used for anything that needs real-time 3D graphics.
Yeah, well, the philosophy began with ZZT and continued onward. We're not just building a game for players to play. We're also building tools that could be used for building that game or any other game and catering to all the artists and designers who would use the tool. And so that philosophy started at the very early parts of Unreal development. I was building the tools for...
level designers like Cliff Pozinski and artists like James Schmaltz. And as we began marketing the game, thinking it was six months away, we were constantly releasing screenshots and things like that, other companies started calling us and saying they wanted to build 3D games too, but they didn't have the expertise for that and they wanted to license our 3D engine.
And this was one of the coolest pivots in Epic's history. Microprose called up Mark Raine, our vice president and longtime business guy, and said they wanted to license our engine. And Mark Raine was like, oh. What? You want to license what? An engine? What engine? And they explained to him what they wanted to license. He said, oh, that engine. Yeah, yeah, that's very expensive.
But this was one of the critical things that kept Epic going through that three and a half years. We were starting to license our engine out to other developers. Microprose took two licenses, and we got in half a million dollars from that. And the company, GT Interactive, licensed our engine to build... another game, and we got paid for that.
We had this revenue stream funding the development of Unreal Engine from other games that were being built by other developers. Because they were the lifeline for the company, we took the engine business very seriously from the start. We set up... mailing lists so that our partners could ask us questions.
And all the developers and artists working on our games were participating and helping customers. Everybody took that very seriously because it was our funding source. And that's kind of set this dual spirit of Epic of building technology and supporting game developers simultaneous with building games and supporting gamers. It's continued onward and just grown over time.
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