Could the next Elder Scrolls game you play look like the screenshot below?  Euclideon is working to make that a reality with their new voxel engine.  The engine is strictly CPU based, similar to the long dead Larrabee architecture but with one major difference, currently they are capable of rendering 2000×1000 frames at around 32 FPS on a six-core processor.  They are properly referred to as frames because this is a point cloud solution, not pixel based.  They generated the images in the video you can see at The Tech Report by rendering 3D scans of real objects and locations but programmers will still be able to create scenes with Maya or 3ds Max.  Euclideon feels that they can still get a lot more performance out of a CPU with software refinements and are not planning on moving to GPU at this time.  With two unannounced games using this new engine in development it might be time to make sure your machine has at least 6 cores so that you can be ready for their launch

"We first heard about Euclideon back in 2011, when the company posted a video of a voxel-based rendering engine designed to enable environments with unlimited detail. This month, the firm made headlines again with a new video showing the latest iteration of is technology, which uses 3D scanners to capture real-world environments as point-cloud data. We spoke to Euclideon CEO Bruce Dell to find out more about these innovations—and about the first games based on them."

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