How far have we come?

I remember running Doom 2 perfectly on an old 486 PC in DOS. Carmack recently said that he believes graphics have pretty much got as good as they can get in some interview for which I'm not sure where it's at. Anyway, I'd agree with that if we had low-end PC's that could run Crysis 2 at max settings at 60 FPS. I wonder how long it will be. Tech just seemed to come so fast since the old Dooms.

I'm thinking he's talking about uncanny valley territory. For some reason, it's when graphics and realism can get so good that they actually become unappealing, and not fun. We haven't hit that yet, but we're damn close, as animation has still been a crutch in games, not graphics.

Well,

when it hits the mass market it will. But I recently got a 40 inch HDTV and am running me old xbox360 at 1080p and I can still see the old jaggedy lines from bad AA.

The next gen consoles will probs be the ones that do that.

...unless you can afford an Uber PC

.I can't sry

PCs have been outperforming consoles for years. They are running on 5+ year old tech, after all.

True, but the mass market doesn't have it.

Graphically speaking, in both CGI movies and video games, stylized products tend to do much better than photorealistic alternatives. Take pixar movies or a game like Team Fortress 2. Because of the uncanny valley, people empathize far more with these sort of "cartoony" rendered characters than, say, that Final Fantasy movie a few years back or games like Crysis. You can even look at the shift in art style between Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion's textures were far more photorealistic, along with their facial proportions, but they just looked... off. Skyrim's art style made everything look a tad more "animated," to a much better cinematic effect. Until the technology for photorealistic rendering is absolutely perfected, I think the most compelling titles graphically will tend to lean to the more fantastic.

I dunno, I think Crysis is one of the few games on the way OUT of the uncanny valley - Crytek did an amazing job making everything look soft, and basically as it does IRL.

Crysis made consoles. XB has 2z AA.

I'm stuck in the past playing games from 10-20 years ago.

If I wanted realistic graphics, I'd be larping.

julz_d said:

Crysis made consoles. XB has 2z AA.

Crysis on consoles is a bad example because they (did a decent job) of basically removing a lot of the shaders and obscuring the lack of detail with a lot of bloom, console style.

If you put enough work into it, even hand-drawn cartoon characters can appear life-like, as many older Disney and Don Bluth animations can prove.

Similarly, if some poor soul worked his ass off on a super-detailed model of a human being with enough polygons to simulate even birth marks, skin pores and stubble, it would be possible to have a non-uncanny virtual human. It might not be displayable in real time in any of the actual hardware of course, but that's simply a matter of incremental power increase (aka throw enough hardware at it, throw 256 GPUs in parallel if you have to, and it will work).

I had once read in an old VR magazine (in 1994) that a scene needs to have 100 million visible polygons per frame to give a passable illusion of reality, regardless of whether you use texture mapping or not. For comparison, the PS3 can do 275M per second, so even if it's a far cry, if you could combine the powers of 50 PS3s it should be possible to have 60 fps 100M polygon scenes, so this is simply an incremental goal which will eventually be reached.

IMHO the real limit lies exactly in the ability to produce such hi-quality artwork in a reasonable amount of time, even if you have the hardware to display it. It's no good to be able to display a perfect CAD ray-traced model of a human if an artist has to work two years to put every hair in place: tools to generate all that crap are required.

Similarly, imagine how stiff animation would be or how long/expensive it would be to animate characters if there was not motion capture technology and skeleton-based animation, even with perfectly looking models.

Artistic quality > Technical perfection.

It would be pretty easy if you could emulate the way your body "grows" a human :-)

Simulate DNA to RNA. How to grow a human in 1000 trillion easy steps!

The uncanny valley thing is interesting because it's happening in both Hollywood and in video games. Just 10 years ago, when Hollywood CGI was first showing signs of true photorealism, video games were still blocky and low-detail. Now we have video games with extraordinary amounts of detail, right down to individual blades of grass, physically accurate water and believable light and shadow; meanwhile, Hollywood CGI has only gotten a bit more photorealistic. I wouldn't be surprised if, within a decade, pre-rendered graphics will essentially be a thing of the past. Everything will be real-time!

There's still Unlimited Detail.

I think we're reaching a point now where a true leap in graphics isn't a question of sheer horsepower, it's more about the amount of time and manpower needed to accomplish things.

486 running Doom perfect impressed me.

Coopersville said:

There's still Unlimited Detail.

I had to restrain a laugh with that

Coopersville said:

There's still Unlimited Detail.

I think Tormentor already has a guide for that???