Local company Unlimited Detail promises just that...

What would you say to high end graphics without the high end hardware? Unlimited Detail's new technology might be just what you're after.

Ever wondered what the PC gaming landscape would look like in a decade?

Recent years have seen the advent of fluid 3D gaming and motion controllers, but there are other lesser known developments occurring in the industry that have the potential to change the face of PC gaming.

Imagine you had the ability to play the latest PC game at its full potential regardless of the system configuration you are playing on? Nothing less than a revolution in computer graphics would be required to achieve such a feat, you say?

Well you will be surprised to learn that not only has this alleged graphics revolution been in the works for quite some time now, but that the technology comes from a small Australian software startup known as Unlimited Detail.

Revolution in rendering
UD claims that its alternative rendering method can churn out high-quality computer graphics without the need for graphics chips or processor-hungry machines.

The basics of this rendering technology involve ditching polygons in favour of billions of 'point cloud' dots to represent an environment. The claimed result is quite literally unlimited geometric detail while the whole thing runs in custom-built software at smooth framerates on a conventional PC processor.

Original developer and CEO, Bruce Dell, commenced work on Unlimited Detail over three years ago and finally, after significant backing from investors, formed a company in April.

"Major companies have got to a point where they improve the polygon-count in graphics-rendering by 22 percent a year. We have made it unlimited. It's all software that requires no special hardware, so you get truly unlimited detail in your scenes", says Dell.

Voxels vs Polygons
The idea of using atoms or points is also known as Voxels and is not a new concept, of course. However, Voxels have traditionally been limited to graphics applications for the medical and mining industries, not video games.

Analyst Jon Peddie suggests the technology could provide a balance between traditional polygon rendering and computationally intensive ray-tracing methods.

"With Voxels, you create a volume of points and look at those points to see what the picture is all about," Peddie told Wired. "That gives very accurate representations of the world you are trying to render, without taking up too much computational resources."

The unique aspect of Unlimited Details alternative rendering method is the custom built-software, which is said to work like a search engine that finds only the necessary dots to render a particular scene.