At the Siggraph graphics industry event in August, Square gave an impressive real-time demonstration of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within that ran on a graphics workstation. GameSpot recently received a copy of the demo, which reproduces the scene from the movie when Aki and Professor Sid discuss the political intrigue brewing against them. The real-time demo ran surprisingly smoother than expected on a cutting-edge PC, considering the level of detail. While the visual quality clearly can't match that of the prerendered movie--which was produced on a SGI render farm with more than 1,000 processors--the scene is far beyond what we're accustomed to seeing in games.

　　One of the key graphical features that has carried over from the movie is the use of shaders to represent material properties realistically. Shader programs were invented for CG movies, and the technology is built into the Pixar Renderman software used to render the Final Fantasy movie. However, this sort of programmability has been recently introduced to the world of games with Nvidia's Xbox and GeForce3 GPUs and with ATI's Radeon 8500 PC graphics card. Running the demo on a GeForce3 card, you can see complex surface textures in both characters' clothing and skin. The hair, while nowhere as complicated as in the theatrical movie, is also quite complicated for a real-time scene and is made up of individual polygons.

　　The real-time demo defaults to follow the camera movement from the movie, but to prove that it is real time, it's possible to move the camera and change a few characteristics of the Aki and Sid character models, including the color, shininess, and bumpiness of their skin. To make all this possible, the demo has stiff system requirements, so we ran the demo on a 1.53GHz Athlon XP system with a GeForce3 Ti 500 graphics card and Windows XP.