I would have zero problems with watching that as a movie. Considering that it's rendered in real-time... it's pretty impressive.

Moving this video to ChaosEngine's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by Mordhaus.

*scifi

Adding video to channels (Scifi) - requested by ant.

If this is a game, I'd buy it.
If this is a movie, I'd rent it.
If this is a tech demo, I'd demand they make a game or a movie from it. This is an interesting universe.

*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by blacklotus90.

most impressive...what movie quote?

Empire Strikes Back - Vader to Luke in the carbonite chamber

Followed Unity 3D for a while and was quite happy to see them release version 5 for free due to the pressure Epic put on them by releasing Unreal Engine 4 for free as well. This short is definitely pretty impressive but I still think UE is the more capable engine for sure. Unity also has a very slow release cycle with a lot of promised features either being pushed to future versions or forcing users to rely on the Unity marketplace.

They cannot make a game from this. This has a fixed PVS which allows them to pool all resources in the shot where the camera is facing. It's still real-time, but you can't free roam. There are some neat shaders applied here, but I'm more impressed with the sound than anything else.

And the direction & cutting. Really good!

How far behind do the playable game graphics tend to trail behind the demos?

Feels like it's about 2 years.

That's one of the reasons I enjoy demos, because I know that one day soon I'll get to play games with that level of graphics.

Most impressive.

The short answer is "It depends!"

I know it's a crappy answer, but there are way too many parameters at play. There are many games today that have scripted scenes in them that are pretty cinematic. Think of GTA III, from 2001. The cut scenes in that game still outshine the actual gameplay of GTA V today.

If the scene is scripted, then all the animation, and camera movement can be fine tuned and all compute resources are pooled into the viewport of the camera. This allows the artists to focus all of the trickery on the shot itself, but not the rest of the world. From a PVS or scene-graph stand point, you have pretty much reduced the complexity to just what you are seeing.

I do not know how they made this demo and cannot comment on it with any authoritative capital. I've written 3D engines before (not for videogames though) and can comment on the technology I think I'm seeing here. My comments are just an opinion based on what I know. I do not have access to Unity and have never used it before. But here it goes:

For a scene like this, there should be reduced/canned computation in:

• Collision detection and response
  
• AI
  
• Animation / IK
  
• PVS
  
• Texture Atlasing
  

• PBR shader
  
• Motion Blur Shader
  
• Depth of Field Shader
  
• Cascaded Shadow Maps Shader
  

Demo is all right, we really don't see anything we haven't seen before. Pretty much the onlything we havn't seen is mass scale destruction. Heck even small scale is so-so, mainly because of 2 things. #1 you really need a chunk of processing time for convincing physics calculation of a good amount of debris (We still don't see the level of particle effects the old AGEIA PPU demo's had) and #2 realistic enough fire effects. #1 is at least possible with tech that we have today, but #2 requires that someone actually create the effect for use in games.

Fire as you may have gathered, is probably the most difficult CG effect to create. Hollywood took 20 years after CGI effects started in movies before it actually didn't look fake. Today fire in CG is very manageable, but before that it just made more sense to record your fire on a matte backdrop and insert the footage over one of the final rendering passes of your 3d project.